Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 114: LISTENER CALLS: Growing a Podcast Without Social Media

Episode Date: July 15, 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.- Balancing necessary shallow and important deep work. [3:23]- Increasing reading retention. [9:556]- Keeping track of goals or ideas for future pursuit. [13:59]- Growing a podcast without social media. [19:32]- Seasonal breaks from work. [30:51]- Community bucket struggles. [33:54]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. Thank you to everyone who heeded my call in recent episodes to submit more listener calls. We have gone from a situation in which we were starting to run low to a situation where we now have a healthy amount. So keep those coming. Calnewport.com slash podcast for more instructions. on how to submit those listener calls. You can do it straight from your browser.

We got a good mini episode today. I actually have six questions I'm going to try to get to. So to make this fit, I will try to be terse in the places where I can be terse. I have something about balancing sales with the work that makes those sales worthwhile once you make them, something about reading retrenching, something about seasonal breaks. I have a deep life question in here. Something about tracking ideas. collection of questions. So I want to get right into it. But first, we do need to pay the bill.

So we'll do a quick ad read and then we'll jump right into those calls. I want to take a moment to talk about our friends at Magic Spoon. I also want to offer some personal gratitude to Magic Spoon. They've been a sponsor of the show for almost a year now. But they, in recent months, have been filling a pretty important role in my own life. as I emerge from the pandemic, I'm getting back in front of crowds again. I'm getting back in front of the camera again. I had a Netflix crew at my house last week.

I'm going back to the classroom soon. I have to start taking seriously again what I'm eating. Not a lot of sugar in my life. Not a lot of junk food. Not a lot of processed food. Not a lot of beer. You know, I got to get my act together. Well, Magic Spoon is a lifesaver because it's a delicious treat-style cereal that I can eat.

even when I'm watching what I consume. Why is that? Because it has zero grams of sugar, 13, 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs and 140 calories per serving. It's keto-friendly. It's gluten-free. It's grain-free. It's low-carb.

It's GMO-free. You can even build your own variety box with flavor such as cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon. So it feels like a treat you can have when you have that craving without it actually spiking your bloodshunds. sugar or overloading you with wasted empty calories. So I want to thank you, MagicSpoon, for allowing me to get through this period of getting my health act back together, making that a little bit easier.

So go to magic spoon.com slash cow to grab your delicious cereal and try it today. Use that promo code Cal at checkout to say $5 off. Of course, if you don't like it, it's 100% happiness guarantee. They'll refund your money, no questions asked, but you will. You'll like it. So get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com slash cowl and use the code Cal to save $5 off. Let's get started with a call about that never-ending tension between the necessary shallow and the needle moving deep. Hi, Cal, this is Bernie from Greenville, South Carolina.

I'm a consultant for a small boutique consulting firm and have to bring my own clients to the table. This means it's really important for me to keep a good safe. pipeline of potential clients. So in the past, I've sent emails requesting a coffee meeting or a Zoom call with warm leads. Most of the time, those warm leads are non-responsive, and I end up sending a couple more emails and eventually drop the issue and move on. Typical sales. Sales is ultimately a necessary evil for me. My attention capital is best leverage while doing the work of solving client problems, teaching our business courses, or when doing one-on-one coaching. I can't leverage the specialization principle as much as I would like because I have to sell in order to do my work.

I implement a version of the protocol principle with established relationships, but business depends on new relationships, and new relationships are really hard to set that kind of firm protocol with. So here's my question. Is there a process that will both enable me to land a sales meeting that doesn't require, unnecessary and often unwanted back and forth emails. Well, Bernie, I have two pieces of advice to offer here. First is a somewhat radical suggestion that I unpack a little bit in a world without email. And that is that you think about yourself as having two part-time jobs.

Part-time job number one is a salesperson. Finding warm leads, transforming those warm leads, into actual clients. Your other job is actually servicing clients, hosting courses, doing coaching, the value production deep work. So the work that actually requires you to apply hard one skill to add value to information. I would treat these as two part-time jobs. That is, here is when I work this job and here is where I work this other job, and I don't

mix them. Now, that might be, okay, I work my part-time sales job from three to five every day, or it might be, I work my part-time sales job all day, Wednesday. You treat it like two part-time jobs. And I mean, really make a separation, your task list, your strategic plans, your inbox, like really, you try to treat these as two different jobs. The one exception here will be your calendar. You probably just want one calendar for all your different jobs. And you try to optimize each of those jobs. So when you're in your hours for being a salesperson, like I want to generate as many leads as possible in this time.

And honestly, you don't have to worry a ton about context shifting. If nothing in your sales part-time job really involves hard concentration, nothing in your sales part-time job requires you to apply hard-won skills in a state of deep concentration, you don't have to worry so much. Then when you're in your other job, well, that's all about applying hard-one skills. When you're in your other virtual part-time job here, it's all about concentrating on hard things. You really want to build that, the time set aside for, that job very carefully around minimizing context shifts and making sure that you're getting better

and then extracting the most possible value from the skills you have at the moment. And you see these as two different endeavors as opposed to interleaving them. And that clear separation in time, this is when I do this job, I clock out, this is when I do that job. I think it's going to be really important. If you would all have the flexibility to use even different locations for these two jobs, I would. Do my sales job in this office and I do my other type of job in that office. That might not be feasible, but this is how far I want you to think about potentially going with this distinction. That's my first piece of advice. All right. So then two, when you're in your part-time sales job, you do want to optimize that. There are places here that you can

get rid of unnecessary back-and-forth messaging. Now, the biggest forcing factor here is that you can't do messaging for your sales job when you're in your other job, the acting on your sales job, working with your client's job. So you have to figure out some processes that doesn't require just sort of ongoing back and forth emailing through all time. You only have certain hours to work on it. So that forcing function can help you figure out how do I do this type of scheduling. If there's only certain times during the day or certain times each week in which I can do sales communication, you can figure that out. Come with a little bit more structure. This is going to be what I call an asymmetrical protocol here that you're not really walking the client through explicitly

This is how we're going to communicate. You know, whatever. You just sort of figure it out. You use scheduling software and process-oriented emailing. There's a lot you can do to make sure that, like, okay, my communication can only happen during the time I put aside for the sales job. So let me make sure it fits in there. Let me maybe try to minimize some steps required to get from my first lead gen follow-up to actually landing a client. But you also want to optimize just being better at sales.

Like, do more calls. Here's my time for being a salesperson. How do I get the most out of that time? How do I get a virtual promotion in this virtual job? Like, oh, okay, I'm doing two hours a day, three days a week. Man, I better fill those with hunting down leads. I better start using CRM software and using it smartly. So I'm really following up on the leads properly, trying to get as much out of them.

When I'm in that sales job, I'm thinking only about how I do that job better. And when I'm in the other job, nothing about that job comes up. It's all about how do I treat my clients better. Now, some might argue, as they do, that, look, it's the same amount of time, so why do these superfluous unnecessary divisions? Like, you have two different jobs. Psychologically, it makes all the difference. Because once these things are mixed together, then it is sloppy, and the context shifting becomes way worse. There's way more context shifting when you intertwine multiple different roles back and forth throughout the day.

You also get resentment. So when they're all just mixed together, the time you need to, spend on sales feels like it's getting in the way of the time that you want to spend on actually dealing with clients. And so you start minimizing the time you spend on sales because you resent what it's taking away from what you're spending on clients and then you generate less leads. You slow down. Just make them clear. I have these two jobs and I want to do each of these jobs as well as possible in the time put aside for them. I think for exactly this type of role that you have a clear, shallow, deep split is exactly a type of situation in which this strategy will get

you some good value. All right, let's zag from the world to work and do a quick question here about reading retention. Hi, Cal, this is Arena. Thank you for all you do. I've been a really big fan of yours for a number of years. My question today has to do with writing for retention. I've gotten into a pretty good reading habit, and between paper and audiobooks, I usually average more than two chapters a day. I now want to take my comprehension and retention to the next level. I think it was you who mentioned that one of the best ways to remember something was to paraphrase it, so I'm wondering, if I were to write a book report, what structure and format would that take? I'm also not super confident in my writing abilities, so would you recommend any writing courses,

or does skill just come with practice? Well, I enjoy this question, Arena. The summertime in particular is a season of reading for me, so I'm definitely in the mindset of reading is great. everyone should be reading more because I get to read a lot more in the summer as a professor because I have less on my plate. In June, I finish six books. Here in July, I'm on track to have my first three books done in the first 10 days. So I'm really bullish on reading right now. I always get a lot more satisfaction at a periods of my life in which I'm getting a lot of reading done.

So I'm glad you're asking about this. If you want to increase your retention, especially for nonfiction books, but writing up a brief summary is not a bad idea. here's how I would suggest doing it. While you're actually reading, just do my margin marking system. So if a page has interesting points on it, put a slash across the corner, marking that page is a page that has notes,

and you can put little checks or underlines next to the passages or sentences that caught your attention you think are important. And then just read. So when you're reading, you're just making quick notes. It doesn't slow you down. Friction is minimal.

When you're done with a book, it's marked. Some pages have slashes in the corner. Those pages have checkmarks or underlines on particular passages. You can now process that book at your leisure. The process this book to write a report on it, for example, you just go through the marked pages and just read the marked sentences. And you get a quick review of the big points you thought were important from this book. If you want, write up a short summary of that.

Have a note-taking system in which you keep your book-note summaries. It could be analog. It could be digital. If you're more on the geeky side of the spectrum, you could use something like Rome Research and actually link these reports together with unrelated topics to get an emergent semantic web. If you're more artistic, you can use a bullet journal with nice pins,

however you want to do it. No need to write a fancy report. No need to write this report like a review. No need to care about the quality of your sentences. In fact, bullet points are even fine. Just like here's like big points. I'm writing my own words from the book. And you're just going through,

and basically paraphrasing the sentences you've marked, which again, you can do this in five or ten minutes if you haven't marked too much of the book. The margin marking system is highly efficient for both recording and then later reviewing information from nonfiction books. And that is really useful. You sort of go through and summarize the main points.

May put a few sentences at the end. Like, okay, basically, like this book is making the point X with a bunch of examples and my most important takeaway was Y. And you should be able to do a report like that in 15 minutes or less. That's probably a good idea that we, will help that review and paraphrasing with a final summary will help you retain the ideas. The key thing here, however, is the friction is minimal. I don't want to get into way of you actually reading the book.

If you have to take summaries or notes with every reading session, you'll do less sessions. Similarly, if writing this summary is something that takes you 90 minutes, you're not going to do it most of the time. So the unifying print property of this approach is friction is very low. you mark the big points, you summarize the big points, but you don't spend too much time, too much time on that, but you still get pretty good retention out of it. All right, rolling along now. Speaking of notebooks, let's do a question about idea tracking. Hi, Cal, this is Sean.

Thank you for answering my prior questions. I'm knee-deep applying lessons and methods from the podcasts and deep resets, the time block planner and the life of focus course. It's been life-changing stuff and going really well, but there's an issue. When I listen to this podcast, I inevitably get exposed to some idea that I know I should implement, but feel that it's not timely. It would introduce one ball too many to juggle in the present, given that I'm still in the experiential learning phases and praxis of the aforementioned concepts and ideas. My question then is this, what do you do when you come across ideas that you can't act upon immediately, but that you feel are worthwhile endeavors? Kind regards from Miami.

Well, that's a good question and a good use of the term praxis. So here's the big picture answer. You should have a trusted system for taking notes on what I call lifestyle ideas. Ideas about major changes to how you live your life or goals you pursue or shifts you might make in your career or new endeavors you might take on and your thoughts about such decisions. Have a place where all of that goes. This should be reviewed when you do. do your strategic semester quarterly planning. So when you build that plan for each quarter or semester,

that's when you look through this lifestyle notebook. So you can trust that those thoughts will be seen. Now, of course, you don't have to go back and review everything you've ever written. You can just review the things that seem new. You don't have to go back and look at six-year-old thoughts you've moved on from, but everything that seems relevant gets looked at. You can do it more often, but that should be the line in the sand. No quarterly or semester plan gets built without a review of these lifestyle notebooks. We shouldn't underestimate the importance of having a trusted system for these type of ideas. I started doing this pretty early in my grad student career at MIT.

It was because these type of ideas were causing stress. I was stressed that ideas I was having about how to live my life, how to shape my life at a time where this was highly relevant because my life was highly malleable, I was young, there's a lot of decisions being made that they would just get forgotten. And it was taking up a lot of mental resources. It was a big open loop, source of anxiety, source of stress. I realized I need a trusted system to keep track of these big ideas, not just tasks that need to get done. Not just my schedule, my upcoming calendar, but big ideas about my life could be just as much a source of stress if left uncaptured as the other more mundane obligations.

And that's where I began my process of regularly reviewing with a trusted system. Now, early on, I used moleskins. Moleskin notebooks to keep track of those ideas. And my system was, when I fill a mullskin, and I'm going to switch to a new mullskin, I review that old one. And any ideas from there that I think are still relevant, still things I should keep in mind,

still things I might act on and that I need to think about or remember, I would copy manually summary of those ideas to the beginning of the new mullskin. This way, when it came time to review the moleskin, I only ever had to review the current one. Because I had copied forward anything from the last one that I need to remember,

and then my new notes were in there. Now, I have a stack in my closet that's many feet high if I was to stack them all one on top of each other, of these moleskins I filled over the year. So you might be saying, well, wouldn't eventually the stuff you're copying over from the old moleskins get longer and longer until you have more things to copy over than there's even space in the new one?

And no, this wouldn't happen. And the reason is, most ideas of this type that come up don't last. It's important to get them down because it's a source of stress if you don't. But after the few months it takes to fill a Molska notebook, the vast majority of things in there, you're like, okay, this is not so important anymore. I'm no longer interested in this. This has been replaced by a better version of the idea, or it's just something that now on reflection, I don't think it's that important. So it's actually like a very useful aging process for the ideas.

And so that system worked really well for me. You can also use digital systems. I think this is definitely a useful option. Now, I've used both. I sometimes subdivide sort of peer lifestyle and professional lifestyle-related questions and keep those notes in different places. But you can use digital systems. Same idea. I've Evernote notebooks.

I have Rome research pages. However you want to do it. Google Doc. You know, however you want to do it. That's fine, too. And then you don't have to worry so much about copying things from one notebook to another, but you still probably want to do something similar that when you do your review of these ideas, when setting up your new semester or quarterly plan, that you start to depreciate some of the older ideas in the system,

move them into an archive, move them into a not active list. So you're not having to see everything you've ever written for the last 10 years every time you do this review. So I'm a little bit tool agnostic here, but that is, I think, a line in a sand, a trusted place where lifestyle ideas go, be it virtual or analog, a lifestyle notebook that you review at the very least every time you do your semester or quarterly plan. And of course, it can be reviewed more often. You can curate that and collate that and take things out of it and add things to it. If you want to do it more often, that's fine.

But do it at least at that semester quarterly rhythm. Now, of course, it wouldn't be a listener calls mini episode if we did not have a question about social media. Hi, Gall. My name is Alexander Ross and I am software engineer from Greece. My question is the following. How can you get an audience for your blog or podcast without relying on social media? I have a blog and I'm also trying to create my own podcast. So in order to promote my content, I turn to social media, especially Twitter. However, because of the negative effects of social media, I want to stop relying on them. Do you have any tips? Thanks a lot.

So I think there is a hidden assumption in your question that we need to look at and potentially destabilize. So the hidden assumption, which is quite common when creative professionals think about social media, the hidden assumption is that, well, using social media to promote my blog and podcast would grow the audience. But the question is, is that worth? the tradeoffs of using these platforms more frequently. But I'm going to question that assumption. One of the more powerful, attractive features of social media platforms is that they give you the illusion of having an audience. And they give you a sense when you're on that platform that, well, there's a lot of people out there following you that want to know what you have to say, that are listening to what you have to say.

there's a lot of ways they create this illusion. There's the actual just follower count or friends count themselves. Our mind treats those as people who are really into what we have to say in following us, but a lot of those mean something much different. They're reciprocal, they're random, they're bots. I friended you because I needed to find out something and I don't really care and haven't looked at anything you've said ever since then. There's this reciprocal culture of people you know,

maybe trading back and forth likes or retweets, it gives you the sense of there's an audience and I'm engaged. And it's playing with this powerful drive we have to be of influence and they have an audience listening to us. And that's part of the reasons why these platforms are so sticky. But for the vast majority of users, they're actually really not being heard that much. The audience is much smaller than they think of people who are actively listening.

The influence they have on this audience is actually quite small. This is well known to book authors who figured out a few years ago, that, huh, social media follower accounts did not translate very well into book sales. Whereas other things like email list subscriber accounts did, and so we begin to figure out, these audiences are somewhat illusory. It's not an auditorium. It is not an auditorium full of people who came to hear what we have to say. It's more like we're at a career fair, and we're one of 100 booths yelling out what

we have to say. Maybe a couple people passing by might hear it, but most of the people there are also hearing from all these other booths and our influence is actually not nearly as big as we think. All right. So that's a good analogy to keep in mind. When we turn to other types of internet-enabled platforms that support creation and the ability for anyone to consume or read your work, things like podcasts, things like blogs, they don't have these mechanisms of giving you the sense that there's a large crowd. Crowds there, audiences there are much more meaningful, but they're much harder to grow because it's a meaningful crowd. If you have a certain number of people subscribing to your blog,

getting it sent to their inbox, reading it on RSS fee, they're much more committed to that content. They're giving it much more attention than a Twitter follower. That's why email subscription lists have huge conversion rates compared to, let's say, Twitter or Instagram follower list for most authors. Similarly, if someone's going to subscribe to your podcast, get this thing sent into their iPod or iPhone, and they're going to probably listen,

to it. That's a huge commitment. It's much different than, oh, at some point, I friended you on Facebook. And occasionally your stuff shows up in a news feed. I never read it. Now, when you go to those type of social internet platforms, you feel like, oh, well, over here, man, this is the wild desolate wild west. There's tumbleweeds going by. There's no audience here. Let me go back over to social media where that's where my audience is. And I just need to get them to come over here, but it's tumbleweeds over there as well. Someone has just put up a fake backdrop of a crowd. They painted a piece of canvas and put it in front of the camera, but behind it is the desert. If it feels empty in one place, it's probably empty in the other as well. So, what does it mean?

What means is where the focus has to be is creating stuff that there's an audience feels like there need to listen to it. It's very aspirational. It's very interesting. It's very entertaining. You have to produce good stuff. And the wonder of the internet is that you can produce good stuff without having to invest a huge amount of money, without having to go through narrow gates, and anyone can consume it once produced. The downside is, like, most stuff is bad, and it's really hard to try to find the unique take and hone your craft and have something to say that people want to hear. But if you do that, it's not so hard to find an audience.

People like good stuff, and then once some people like it, other people will like it. The way social media helps podcasts and blogs grow is not podcasters and bloggers telling their audience come listen to my podcast and blog it's because people who find your stuff and if it's good

tell other people about it they do the work for you anyway so there's that general point here there's a general point here be wary of the sense that social media gives you that you're in an auditorium

talking to a big crowd that's not the case you're in the auditorium you're one of many many different vendors and the crowd is milling around everywhere and most people aren't even hearing what you have to say and two there's no shortcut

to being so good you can't be ignored if you want to grow an audience. Yeah, there's some details about how do they initially find you and how that happens, but it kind of works out pretty well if you're producing something really good. So that's what I would focus on. I mean, unless your last name is Kardashian and you have already established this huge audience, and okay, yes, you want to tell them about your new blog and podcast so some of them can shift over. But otherwise, if like you say, social media is something you worry about, don't use it. if you don't already have a huge audience, you're not giving up some massive opportunity

to jumpstart your blogger podcast. Focus on producing content. Oh, I hate that word. Producing art. Producing argument. Producing monologue or entertainment that people really value. Then people will find you.

I'm going to take a moment to talk about our friends at Grammarly. So there's two tiers of product with Grammarly. There's their basic Grammarly service, which is free, works on all of your devices and all the different apps that you do your writing in, and then there is the paid product called Grammarly Premium. Let me actually delineate this ontology here. The free Grammarly is going to fix your mistakes.

Spelling errors, punctuation errors, grammar errors, you have to be doing this. If you do any type of professional communication, You simply cannot have those mistakes. You can't have an unnecessary possessive apostrophe. You can't use the wrong variant of there. These are unforced errors that will greatly reduce your effectiveness. Again, your point across being taken seriously.

You've got to be using something like that. Can't make mistakes. Grammarly premium. Now, this costs money. Again, worth all your devices, every app you write in. But what it brings to the table is something that I think is somewhat incredible from a technology perspective. it actually can help you make that writing not just mistake-free but better.

It can give you clarity suggestions. Here's a clearer way of phrasing what you were saying there. It can also give you vocabulary suggestions. This word is kind of overused. Here's a better one to use. This is the type of feedback you would normally get from an editor, the type of feedback that gives professional writing that seamless shine. You can now get some of that in your own writing from this tool.

So now you're not only avoiding unforced errors in your writing, your writing can actually become an asset. When you're doing professional communication, people think there's something about this. It's sharpest to the point. Nothing catches my attention as a weird word or a repeated word. It really makes a difference in the professional context. So if you want to hit Send with Confidence and get your point across more effectively, sign up for Grammarly Premium.

Now here's the good news. You can get 20% off Grammarly Premium if you sign up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. I want to talk here for a moment about ExpressVPN. Here is something you might not know. When you log on to the Internet, let's say you're at home and you use Comcast or Verizon for your Internet. When you log on to the Internet and start visiting websites, they know every website you're visiting because they are watching these packets. come onto their network.

The packet that says, I want to go to Calnewport.com. The packet that says, I want to go to Amazon.com, the buy a Cal Newport book. Your internet service provider sees all of that. Now, in the U.S.,

they can legally sell that information to ad companies. They can say, hey, this person is visiting a lot of websites related to CalNewport.com. You should probably give him some Cal Newport-related ads.

A lot of people don't really that's happening. So how do you get around that? Well, a VPN could be the solution. Here's how a VPN works at a very high level. I'm now logging onto my internet. I use Verizon. I use Comcast. I say, you know what? I don't want you guys to know where I'm going. So here's what I'm going to tell you where I'm going to go is I'm going to connect to a VPN server. Now, once I'm connected to the VPN server, everything I send to it is going to be encrypted. I'm going to encrypt that packet on my machine and then send it to that machine where they'll unencrypt it. So hey, Comcast, hey, Verizon, you don't know where I'm going. All you know is I'm sending encrypted

packets to a VPN server. That VPN server then unencrypts those packets and says, oh, you're trying to talk to Calnewport.com and it talks to Calnewport.com on my behalf, encrypts the response that sends it backs to me. So your provider, Comcast Verizon, it's like, I have no idea where you're going. That is what a VPN offers you. If you're going to use a VPN, use ExpressVPN. They are a leader in the industry. They have these VPN servers all around the world.

Really good bandwidth, very high speed. very easy to set up. It's seamless. So you're there on your browser, going to calnewport.com. You don't know about all this VPN stuff going on in the background. You don't notice any difference in your speed, but you are protecting your privacy against those who are trying to invade it. So secure your online activity today at expressvpn.com slash deep. If you go to that slash deep URL, you will get an extra three months free.

So that's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-N.com slash deep. ExpressVPN.com slash deep. Returning to our show, let's do a call here about a topic that is appropriate for our current season. Hi, Cal. I'm interested in knowing if you have a seasonal approach to breaks in your schedule, I'm an associate professor at a small liberal art school. We have a heavy but manageable teaching load and some scholarship expectations. I'm usually zonked out by the end of spring semester,

and I've learned to work with that and give myself a little time to debrief, maybe a few days to a week. I'm wondering if that time should be spent planning or doing absolutely nothing at all academically. I vote for doing nothing. I'm like you, when I get to the end of the fall semester, I welcome the break,

but I feel pretty good. I've got my energy. When I get to the end of the spring, so now we've gone through a whole academic year, I am exhausted. And so, yeah, take time off, take a week off. Just do nothing, just maintenance mode, I mean, whatever.

some grades have to be submitted or this or that. Take a week off. And then if summer is lighter for you, as it is for most professors, and you're not, let's say, trying to also write books and run podcasts and do all the other crazy nonsense I do, treat your job then implicitly as a part-time job. It's a great time to get ahead on scholarship, but a few hours a day with real focus every single day, plus 30 minutes of incredibly concentrated and organized admin work, that's more than enough.

And now you've got a really, a really restful period where, you know, in the morning you're getting after it, but you're done, you know, by lunchtime. That's great. Or maybe do a little bit more work on some other days, but take Mondays off so you have three-day weekends. You know, like one thing I do is I tend not to schedule in the summer any interviews or meetings or calls on Mondays or Fridays. So it's not a four-day weekend. I do work on Mondays and Fridays, but it's there, it's a quieter, knowing that half of my week is free of meetings and appointments. I love. So play around with that. Take time completely off and then have a much lighter schedule in the summer. You're making progress on your scholarship but not trying to fill all your time. And you're basically regaining your energy before the fall comes. And look, I'm talking to myself here as much as I'm talking to you. I haven't been on campus since March of 2020. I've got 45 students waiting for me in a classroom as soon as we get to the end of August. So I'm trying to make the most of the time I have. It's why I'm away most of July. I'm trying to recharge knowing that this is going to be

the September to end all September because it's not just the end of the summer. It's going to be the end of a year and a half of just being at home. And so I'm trying to recharge as well with the idea that things are going to get different once we get back into the semester. All right, let's try to slip in one last question. I'd like to try to get at least one deep life question into every episode. So that's what we'll do now. Hi, Kel Newport.

I am Aditya, a software engineer who has been in the industry for about two years. I am a huge fan of your work. I really appreciate the philosophy of deep life buckets, where there are keystone habits you use to develop each area of your life that you think is important. One bucket I struggle to maintain, however, is my community bucket. While I am happy mostly with myself,

as someone living alone in a big city, where I have a limited set of connections outside of my job, I sometimes end up feeling a bit isolated. I tried to create a habit of hopping onto a call with a different friend from my past each day, but that attempt proved to be too exhausting and didn't do much towards resolving these feelings. I'm wondering if you have suggestions on how to explore new keystone habits

and develop a sense of community outside my work. Well, I'm glad you're asking this question because community is one of the most important buckets in our schema for the deep life. We are social beings. We are wired for community. Being not just a part of a community, but sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of others.

This is very, very important. And without it is very difficult to have resiliency. It's very difficult to extract the full measure of meaning from life. So I'm glad that you have identified a lack of community in your life as an issue that needs to be addressed because it does. So the first thing I'm going to tell you is to join things. I think this is if you're young and in a city and don't really have many networks outside of your job, join networks. I don't really care what this is.

It could be athletic, right? It could be I am going to get into a sport and join a team. I'm going to get into CrossFit and join a CrossFit box. I'm going to get into Brazilian Jiu and join a Jiu Jizitsu or whatever they call it. I mean, I don't really care what it is. So it could be something like this. I'm going to join a team or a round other. people and we're training towards a common goal. It could be joining another type of organization,

maybe a group that helps other people in your community. That's a good one. You know, here is a, here is a group that, let's say, helps refugees relocated to our city. How can I be useful? Let me sign up. Let me join. If you have a religious background, join a congregation, get involved, not just attending services, but see where you can be useful. So join things that require non-trivial investment of your time and attention, that you're aiming towards a goal that seems worthy and that necessarily puts you in the path of other people working on something similar. Real life, real person, real people around you that you can see working on real things, right? And this is very different than being part of an online community. This is very different than joining a pile on in Twitter or being a part of a long hacker news thread.

That stuff is fine. It's not going to itch the same social scratch in the same way that actually doing things with people that takes more energy than just typing when you feel like it. That's what's really going to get to the core, making you feel more social. So that's probably the number one thing you can do. The only other thing I will add is when thinking about community, remember that family falls under that category. So being involved and being there for members of your family, be it your nuclear family or something. slightly extended. Keep that in mind. A lot of young people take that for granted, but that's actually a place where, like, right

off the bat, you can strengthen, you can strengthen connections. But the key thing that unifies this is that this non-trivial sacrifice of time and energy on behalf of others towards a worthy goal is what you're looking for. So we need to get towards that. These would be the two things I would suggest towards jump-starting it. Again, I'm glad you're asking the question, though because it means that you recognize that this is a really big lack in your life right now. And it's good to get after rectifying it. And I'm going to get after wrapping up this episode. Thanks for the calls.

Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own listener calls. We'll be back on Monday. Another episode of the Deep Questions podcast vacation mode. So we'll see how that goes. And until then, as always, stay deep.