Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 117: Should I Quit My Job to Become a Writer?

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do I find free time as a working mother? [2:10] - How do I time block unpredictable support tasks? [13:56] - How many items are on my (Cal's) task lists and how often do I review? [18:51] - How do I stay productive without clear deadlines? [27:09] - How do get started writing? [32:33] - How do I know if an idea is good? [37:56]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I integrate uncertainty into my goal setting? [43:01] - How should I configure my smartphone notifications? (Rant Alert) [52:18] - Should I quit my design job to become a writer? (Rant Alert #2) [57:50] - How do I make progress on meaningful goals in difficult circumstances? [1:09:37]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 117. So I just got back a few hours ago from a three-week-long trip, largely a vacation with a little bit of business thrown into it. And because I record typically my podcast episodes in advance, it's actually been an entire month since I last sat down and recorded a straight-up deep-quart. questions, Q&A episode. So I have been itching to get back into the studio. I got right back into the studio as soon as we got home because this needs to go up real soon. And I get to dive back into the bread and butter of this podcast, which is answering your questions. I will say briefly, on the various travels I've been involved with, recently I gave two in-person talks, one out

in California and one up in Boston. These were my first in-person talks since I started of this podcast last summer. And it was actually kind of nice to be able to talk to people in person and hear how many of them are deep questions listeners. So that was good. That was really outside of a, it's been a couple occasions where people have stopped me on the street to say they like the podcast. But really, this is the first time I've actually been able to talk to people about the

podcast in person. So that was cool. I look forward to going forward being able to actually meet and talk with more deep questions listeners in person. I have in the back of my mind this idea that I've talked about off and on, that we should do some sort of live event at some point where we actually record a podcast episode with a crowd. So maybe we'll do that. Anyways, it was just cool to actually be able to shake some hands and take some pictures and hear people's thoughts on this show.

All right, enough intro. I have been waiting a month to answer questions. So let's get started then with some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from business mama who asks, How do I build white space into my life as a working mother? I am a small business owner and a mother to five children aged from 25 to five. I choose to run my business in school hours to be at home for the kids, but find that I have very little time for myself.

I generally don't get to do a shutdown ritual because I find I'm just getting back into work mode after lunch when I have to go and pick the kids up. I sometimes share that responsibility with my husband, but that just creates more time to finish work. So business mama, let me start with what my goal is for you with my answer. I would love to help get you to a place where you have significantly more time for yourself. Not just a little bit more time here and there, but significant for relaxing, for solitude, for optional non-urgent projects or adventures, which could be family-oriented or having to do with yourself, not a little bit of time, but a lot of time.

Here in your situation, I think that's definitely possible. Now, there's going to be two general categories of advice I'm going to give here. So the first category is going to be things that reduce your child care load, and the second category is going to be things that reduce your workload. You have a finite bucket of time. Child care responsibilities, mothering responsibilities are pulling some of that time out of that bucket. Work is pulling other time out of that bucket. And when both of those things are done, there's nothing left in the bucket.

So we want to reduce how much is being taken by each. So let's tackle each of those categories of strategies separately. So let's start about reducing to some degree the amount of time you are spending in the child care. first and foremost, based, again, just cursory off of what you've written here, it sounds like you probably need to rework the agreement you have with your husband. I would suggest not knowing a ton of the other details, I would suggest that there is someone who always does the morning shift. Get the kids up, get them ready to school, get them off the school, and someone who always does the afternoon shift. Okay, I'm here when the kids are done with school or child care and making sure they have what they need in the afternoon. right? One person does one, the other person does the other. Now, because you seem like you have

more flexibility in terms of the end of your workday because you run your own business and you're already starting your day early, which you elaborated in your details and are ending your day early already, it probably makes sense that, again, knowing no other information that you're the afternoon shift person, your husband could be the morning shift person. And what this would allow is that you could get up and you already get up early, you told me, you can get up, you know, do your walk or whatever and just get right into work and keep working without interruption until you're done. That is going to open up a lot more productivity than trying to work a little bit and then deal with

the kids and then go back to work. I've done it that way before. It really is hard and you're experiencing this to get your traction going. When you know in about 45 minutes you have to stop dad and deal with kids and then try to shift back to work. So that's what I would suggest. Now, there's a couple reasons for these type of imbalances. There's the obvious gender-based reason that moms are more likely to take on more of the household admin than dads.

There's another reason here that's also worth underscoring, which is running your own business. This happens often, I think, in a family dynamic that, well, if you are running your own business, you have flexibility. And my job is at an office, so I don't have flexibility. So you should just do all the child's stuff that requires flexibility. You should get them to school. You should pick them up from school. and as something in general you have to push back on, you're running your own business is a serious thing.

That is your company. It requires just as much respect for the time required as the job that requires someone to go to the office. So we want to make sure that you don't take on too much of this work just because, in theory, yes, you are your own boss. The other thing I want to suggest here for reducing the child care load in a sustainable way is to have a strict alternation of evening routine. and bedtimes, you know, okay, I do it this night, you do it that night, I do it this night, I do it this night, you do it this night, so that you have a very predictable schedule. These are nights where, you know, after dinner, I can just go do what I want to do, and my husband will be handling bedtime in that routine.

And then the other nights I know I'm doing it. Having predictable evening time off, I think is critical in situations, especially with young kids, because you can then dedicate that time to whatever. And don't do work. don't do work during that time. Don't use that time to catch up on email or do paperwork. This needs to be more indulgently invested time. I am going to go read.

I'm going to go out with friends and have a drink and chat with them. I'm going to exercise. I'm going to watch a movie that I've been wanting to see. I think it's really important if you can have that evening time. Not every night, but predictably. So that's a good way to do it. Finally, consider actually investing money to get a little bit more child coverage. You have a full-time job. You're running a business. The idea that you might, for example,

have some aftercare for the elementary age kids in your life. So, you know, at the school or there's a babysitter that you hire, whatever. And that means you get an extra 90 minutes or an extra two hours. Maybe you're now you can end your day at four instead of having to end it at 245. That can make a huge difference. Invest that money. Again, I think we, when we run our own business and we, we like we're very flexible, we can become hesitant to actually invest money in things like child care or self-care. But we really do need to invest that money is probably going to give you a really big return. So keep that on the docket as well.

So those are three ideas to loosen the grip right now, which is very strong on your life of the child care activities, the grip that has on your time is larger than I think most people who are working full-time jobs with kids. And I want to change that. get you a little bit more breathing room there. All right. The second category of advice here is to reduce how much work you do. Because you run your own business, you are in a great situation with respect to this goal.

You have a lot of autonomy. You do not have a boss you have to answer to. I think it should be possible just based, I mean, I don't know your business in particular, but just knowing small business owners who have taken time control seriously. it is probably possible for you to get to a situation in which, you know, you get up early, you told me about this and you walk and do a few other things where you could work and have a late lunch and be done at that late lunch. Not I have a lunch and I try to work some more, but not really well. Then I pick up the kids.

Like, I would love a life for you. So I'm sort of vicariously brainstorming about your schedule. I would love a life for you where you're up and you walk, you're, you're. work late lunch. 90 minutes to two hours then of time just for yourself. Now, sometimes you have to do useful household things in that time. I don't know, like grocery shopping or taking a car to get repaired, but a lot of times also you can just work on a project or exercise or whatever you

want to do just for yourself. And then you switch over to sort of mom duties at whatever, 3.30 or 4, and every other night you get the evening free. That to me seems reasonable. I think that's completely attainable. How do you reduce work that much? Look, there's a lot of people who have focused on small business efficiency and automation better than I have. I'll give you some reading list recommendations.

Read Paul Jarvis's company of one really gets into how to craft your business into something that is sustainable and supports the lifestyle you want as opposed to the other mindset of try to grow this business as much as possible with the time I have available. read company of one. I blurted it. It's good. Read my book, A World Without Email, to really get into more structured processes and protocols, especially if your service base like you are for interacting with clients, how you can structure this, how you can make your work not be reactive, how you can prevent the constant context switching required, if you just run your communication internally and externally as this ongoing ad hoc back and forth, how to get rid of that and structure the communication. So now you're not context switching. now you're working sequentially. Now it's one thing after another. And boom, your work is done by noon instead of four. All of this is possible. My friend Jenny Blake has a great new podcast out called Free Time. I'm one of the early episodes. I did an interview with her. She interviewed me, rather, for one of her early episodes. It's all about this. How do you run your own company in such a way that it protects free time for you? And she's really a master on automation and hiring. She has a book coming out at some.

point on this topic, which I blurbed and really enjoyed. I'm going to have her on to talk about the book when it gets closer to the time. But those are just some recommendations among others. But I think go big here, right? It really, think through automation, think through outsourcing, think through structures and processes, fire the troublesome clients, lean into the things you do well, charge more and do less of it, whatever. All of the standard techniques so that your work is happening on the schedule you want it to work. And right now it seems like, well, you work in the morning, you're interrupted, you work some more, you're interrupted, you work some more, maybe you have to do some more work in the evening.

And I'm just saying, okay, reduce that by 30%, and suddenly your life is much better. I think you can make that reduction with very little change to your bottom line. If anything, getting more serious about your work and structuring it and communication, might actually make what you do more profitable. So I'm giving you a really long answer here because I think some of these points are just generally relevant to lots of people in lots of even just tangentially related situations. and the theme I think that integrates these answers is taking control.

So instead of just kind of laying back, man, I'm just being buffeted from all in, saying, wait a second, and why? Well, I have all this stuff I have to do with my kids while trying to work. Well, can I reduce that? Oh, maybe I can. I might have to invest some money

and I might have to have some arguments with my husband, but come on. You're doing this every day, the drop off and the pickup, that doesn't fly. I mean, if he's the president or something, maybe, but otherwise, come on. And then like, what can I do with my work? It's your own business.

Like, what do I want this business to be? It doesn't just have to be me on email and just frantic all the time. Let's take control of this thing. Let's mold this into something that's meaningful and generates income but does it on my own terms. I don't know. I'm excited. I'm excited because I think there is a vision here of a really cool life in which you're there for your kids. You're there for your clients.

You're providing for your family. And you're there for yourself. And it's sustainable. And you're able to do really interesting stuff in your life, in your work, in your family, and on your own time. You're so close to all. of this. So keep, keep at it. I hope this advice guides you properly, but don't settle for the way things are. I think there are massive improvements that are a lot closer than you might realize. All right. You can tell I've been away from doing these Q& episodes for a month because my first

question right out the bat, 10 minute long answer. I will try to do better to rein myself in, but yeah, I'm excited. I haven't done these. I haven't been able to dispense advice in a while. All right, so let's keep things rolling here and do a question from Brian. Brian asks, at my job, I'm assigned support tickets. And I don't know up front how long a given ticket will take. It might take 15 minutes or it might be a few hours. How should I time block in these circumstances? I can't block off, say, two hours to do a ticket if I can't predict how long it will take.

All right, for the uninitiated, when Brian talks about tickets, I assume he is in IT, where IT support issues typically arrive in a ticketing system. So each one is assigned a ticket, and then as an IT professional, you pick up your next ticket off of the virtual pile, and you work on that issue until it's done, and then you work on the next one. And what he's saying is he doesn't know in advance. Like, is the thing he's about to work on going to be quick, you know, take the cartridge out of the Nintendo blow on it and put it back in, or is it going to be difficult? we need to rebuild the kernel of your operating system. Now, I'm going to generalize my answer here to be for unpredictable support tasks in general,

so not just IT support, but let's say you work as an administrative assistant or an executive assistant or some such, where things are going to come on your plate unpredictably and sort of your job to execute the things that arrive on your plate, and you don't know how long they're going to take in advance. How do we do something like time blocking here? Well, my general advice in these type of support-style roles is that you're not time-blocking for specific support tasks. Your time blocking support time, during which you are going to be executing tickets or executing if you're an administrative assistant tasks that are coming in, however, you know, via email or your boss is dropping them on your plate. However, it works. It's like, okay, this is time where I'm executing.

I don't know how many will get executed, but for the next two hours, that's what I'm doing. Now, what's crucial about this is that this means the other things you need to do that does require planning in advance has blocks for it. Not just like this is when I go to lunch, but also this is when I am going to make progress on this long-term project I'm working on. I'm trying to update our such-and-such system. I'm doing that there. This is when I have a call with a colleague or I have an intake with someone, right? So really what you're doing is in some sense time-blocking non-support task, and then the time in between that is sort of by defaulting, time block to be, I'm just working on support task. I don't know how many is going to get done.

It's just that's what I'm doing during those blocks. Now what happens when you get to the end of one of those generic support task blocks and you're in the middle of something? Well, what you need to do is save state to use a computer science term so that you can move on to the next scheduled block, execute it. And when you get to the next support task block, you can then resume work in the same. on that administrative task wherever you were. So by safe state, I mean, record all the information you need that you can now come back to what you're working on and pick up where you left off. Don't, if you're in one of these support roles, what I'm saying is don't just follow through

one of these tasks to the completion if it's going to overlap other important blocks, because this is really the key to thriving in these roles. Is that anyone in these roles can do the like just execute stuff that comes in, it's the ability to make progress on the non-urgent but important stuff that also has to get done that differentiates the stars from the average. So if you say, I'm going to override this block I put here to make progress on this non-urgent project, I'm going to override this time where I was going to take a break for myself. I'm going to override this time where I was going to do the next lesson in this online course because I'm learning some new system. I'm going to override that block if I'm in the middle of a task.

you're going to override those blocks most of the time. And if you can't get the important non-urgent done, it's really hard to excel in those rules. So save your state, do the other block. When you get back to the next generic support block, reboot what you're doing and finish it. How do you save your state? I recommend having a text file on the desktop of your computer.

You can call it, I call mine working memory. dot text. You could call it current state. dot text and literally just freehand type. All right, here is where I am. I'm working on this. Here's the status. Here's what still needs to be done. You can do bullet list. You can do paragraphs. Here's the relevant information.

Blah, blah, blah. It takes you two minutes. Just dump it in this text file that's open and on your desktop. Then move on and do the other thing. When you get back to your next support task block, all the information is there that you need it. A simple text file on your desktop makes that high. possible. All right. So Brian, that's my recommendation.

General large blocks to work on support. If you're in the middle of a task when you get to the end of one of those blocks, save your state and come back to it during your next support task block. All right. Let's do another quick kind of technical question here. Brett asks approximately how many tasks are on your David Allen Minesweep list and how often do you review it? So what he's talking about here is David Allen's recommendation that you have list or list. on which all of your professional obligations are written down. You get these things out of your head and into this list that you trust, and you trust it because you know you will review it on a regular basis. It's all about not keeping track of things just in your head.

As long-time listeners know, I typically use Trello boards, one for each of my roles to keep track of these sort of ongoing tasks. I probably have between 50 to 100 things total on these different trail boards all told. they get a really careful review once a week when I do my weekly plan. All right, that's where I look over all those lists. I also clean them up. You know, this is no longer relevant. Let me change the status of this by changing it to another column.

Let me combine this with another test. They get a real serious look once a week. Then they get more casual looks at a few other times during the week. One is I'll often have just a general admin block show up on my time block planner, which is time where it's like make progress on tasks. How do you figure out what task to do? I look at those lists. You know, what role am I working on right now?

What's on that list? Let me get a few things done. So they get seen when I get to those admin blocks. They also get seen when I do my shutdown ritual at the end of each day. I do a mind sweep, anything just in my head, anything that I jotted down on a piece of paper that is a new obligation. I want to get on to one of those lists. I do not want to forget it.

I don't want to keep it in my head. It has to get written down. All of those things have to get written down before I can check that shutdown complete checkbox of my time block planner. And so when I'm moving those things at the end of the day during my shutdown ritual onto my list, I also get a view

at those Trello boards then. So a serious view once a week and incidental views throughout the week. Notice what I like about Trello boards is it's not just one long list. Each task is on a card. Each card is under a column that represents its status.

This makes it really easy to glance at a board and figure out what's going on because things are structured. Oh, these are questions I'm waiting to hear back on people from. Here's things that are urgent that I'm trying to do this week. Here's things that have to do with this particular project, but I'm not really working on that project right now. Here are things that I haven't really got into.

I need to figure out what specific tasks they represent. They're kind of ambiguous right now. They're over here in a holding pin. When you structure your task this way, it's very quick to get the lay of the lance. You'd be surprised by how up to speed you are with everything that's going on in your life. And what you get from that, you get mental relief, your mind trust that things aren't being forgotten. So it can relax when you're not working.

And when you are working, you can make better decisions about what should I work on next, what needs to get done. Let's take a moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes this podcast possible. And that is our good friends at Blinkist. As you've heard me say, in our current culture, ideas are power. Where do you get the best ideas? You get them from books. Books are where you have authors who have spent years thinking about something, learning about something, and then carefully structuring their thoughts into long-form prose.

This is where you get deep understanding of ideas, not from tweets, not from TikToks, but from books. Here's the problem, though. There's a lot of books out there. books take a long time to read. It's a non-trivial expense to buy a book. So how do you know what books about a general topic to buy? That is where Blinkist can come into the picture. So what they do with Blinkist is that they take thousands of top nonfiction books and produce short summaries of the main ideas from the books. They call these Blinks. You can read a blink or you can listen to a blink. They have a great app that lets you do both easily. They take just 15 minutes to consume.

So in 15 minutes you can get up to speed on the big ideas of a given book. You know, they're even doing this for podcasts now. They call it shortcast. So if there's a long podcast, you want to get the gist of it, get a shortcast, 15 minutes. Here's the big ideas. Now, why is this important? Well, once you know the big ideas, you can make an informed decision about whether or not that's a book you want to buy and invest much more of your time into.

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To order your pack today, if you're not sure what flavor to get, get citrus salt to start. That's my favorite. There's a lot of other good flavors. Drink element.com. Our next question comes from music student who asks, how do I stay productive without a big project? As a musician, a lot of projects are not done around regular calendar schedules, and most goals are done by recitals, auditions, or performances.

I have found when I have these goals, my playing and focus are at a higher level when I don't have something to work towards. How can I find motivation? Just so you know, I'm currently in my first year of my master's degree with the goal of being able to teach a college, so my path is to go on to a DMA or Doctorate of Musical Arts. I am trying to figure out a way to stay motivated throughout the summer. Well, here's the thing.

When it comes to discipline and motivation for your work, well, there's two approaches. There's an amateur approach, and there is a professional approach. I'm using that terminology because I think it maybe graphs well onto the world of music, which obviously you're familiar with. So the amateur approach is I'm going to tie my work, my actual day-to-day work to a particular deadliner thing that's coming up that will go badly or cause a lot of negative affect in my life

unless I actually do this work right now. So for a musician like yourself, this might be an audition is coming up. I don't want to play badly. The thought of playing badly is negative. I will do effort to avoid negative stimuli. This is sort of conditioning 101. It's a pretty effective way of getting yourself to actually expend energy in the moment. I want to avoid this negative thing that's going to happen in the future.

Students do this all the time. That's why a lot of students say, well, I can't really get my work done until it's the day before. And then I'll stay up all night doing the work. And this just becomes the way they schedule their work. the negative impact of not handing in the paper, the negative impact of bombing the test. As that looms, it forces them to expend energy, even though they don't really want to do it,

and that's how they get their work done. That's the amateur way of doing discipline and motivation. The professional way is to say, forget leveraging my negative avoidance system, and I want instead to engage my positive seeking system. What I'm going to do is sell myself on a vision of myself and my life that I believe in deeply and is very appealing and really resonates with me. It's what I want my life to be like and the thought of not hitting that target increasingly feels intolerable. And allow that positive vision that I am on board with and committed to be the source of motivation for, well, the work I have to do right now.

Why do I have to do this work? well, it's part of what is required to achieve this positive vision. This is a much more sustainable source of motivation and discipline. When you're not fleeing the negative but coming after the positive, it's much more resilient. The work you do will feel much more meaningful. And from a motivational psychology perspective, you're much more likely to sidestep debilitating deep procrastination. So how do we do this practically? well, this clear vision of what you want in your life,

it should sit somewhere you see regularly. I think it should be in your semester or quarterly plan. This could be at multiple scale. So, for example, I have a vision for my career that's relatively big picture that's in my plan for my professional life. I have a shorter scale vision that moves me towards that. It's my vision for where I want to be when I turn 40 next summer. And so I have a multi-scaled vision. because where I want to be by next year,

that's close enough that it's better for motivating action. Okay, so how do you motivate action? Well, now, in your semester or quarterly plan, what you're basically capturing is, here is what I'm doing this semester or quarter to make progress towards the visions. The visions are at the top of the document. Here's my plan for this semester and quarter.

What I'm trying to do this summer, for example. Moving down the line of scale, when it comes time each week to make your weekly plan, you're looking at that semester quarterly plan, and say, oh, here's my plan for this semester. So what needs to happen this week to make progress on this? Moving down the scale even more, when you get to each day and you're doing your time block plan for the day, you're looking at that weekly plan, that weekly plan is laying out.

This is the type of stuff we need to do this week to make vision progress towards our plan for this semester, which makes progress towards our vision. The root of this motivation is the commitment to that high-level vision. You feel it, you taste it, you daydream about it, it gets you excited. you read examples, profiles, and books and watch documentaries of people who are who are encapsulating portions of this motivating vision, you really buy into it. And that is the source of motivation that trickles down to your vision for the semester, to your plan for the week, to what you're doing right now in the moment today.

It will trickle all the way down. And that's the right way to get the energy for the activity, not, oh, man, if I don't do this, it's going to be embarrassing when I'm on stage next week. And this is the sustainable way to get discipline and motivation in professional context. So start working music student on that vision. Our next question comes from Suon, who says, how do you pick a niche to start writing? I'm a grad student working in chemistry. I'm trying to build my writing skills alongside my degree by writing blog articles.

My interest is easy to be piqued by any domain in science. and I'm in a dilemma about which niche I should get started with. Well, Suan, I'm going to start by ignoring your main question and answering a question you didn't ask what I think is important in your context, which is, well, how should you actually get started doing writing? We'll figure out what you should write about here in a second, but this is important because if you focus just on what's my subject matter, great, let me go blog about that.

You could be in some trouble here, at least trouble in terms of actually. actually accomplishing the goal that you have in mind. So here's my big recommendation. You may have heard this before on the podcast. If you want to get good at writing, so do it at a semi-professional level, you have to write for editing. You have to write for an editor that can reject a piece if it's not good, and it's going to stretch you to get towards the extremities of your current talent. Only in that type of deliberately practice stretch is your writing going to improve. Writing for your blog has no editing. Your blog is not going to reject your piece. So it is not by yourself going to necessarily make you a better writer. You have to have

a publication. I'm trying to get my article in. Now that I'm in this publication, I want my article to do well. You need that stretch of writing for other people. If you don't, here's what happens. You'll become like one of thousands and thousands of people out there, aspiring writers who start a blog and only write for the blog. And so they end up every single post with a somewhat amateurish conversational style where the ideas meander and rhetorical questions are thrown out as structuring devices and the whole thing reads as, you know, this is a literary coup, guys. Not someone who actually is doing this at a professional level and you can write a thousand of those blog posts and you're not going to get much better.

You have to write for editing. This is what I did. How did I kickstart getting writing? Not with my blog. That came much later. actually it was writing for the humor magazine at Dartmouth and writing for the newspaper at Dartmouth. The humor magazine was great training because it was nope, nope, nope, okay, we'll take that one. Nope, nope, nope, okay, that one is funny.

And funny writing turned out to be a fantastic foundation for my later style because what is funny writing require? Incredibly precise timing. So you have to control with punctuation and word choice, the timing of the wording so that you can get the right timing to happen in the inner narrative in your reader's heads. You get very good at the sound of your sentences in the reader's head. Need a comma here, not that word there. That's going to, that's going interfere with this word over here. And it was just incredibly competitive. Ivy League humor magazines are competitive. They send writers to all the big shows. And if it was not good, it would not get published. And so great. Now I had to stretch to get better to try to get

things into the magazine. And I got better at it and better at it and ended up the editor-in-chief of that magazine. Same thing with the newspaper. I wanted to write a column form. I wanted to write a humor column, but it was hard. You had to submit op-eds which they would say no, no, no, no, yes. No, yes, no, yes. And if you got five published,

I think, in a quarter, then you could potentially have a regular column. And in the regular column, hey, you were writing for editors. If it's not good, like, come on, what is this? We're not going to publish it. Writing for editing is how I got from amateur to not so amateur. I wrote a couple books, and then I did the same thing. I've talked about this before, but I was writing.

I found this magazine online that did a different style of narrative nonfiction writing. I started writing with them after my first two books to help try to, again, write for editing. They would reject it if they didn't like it to increase my skill at writing. It's all about that type of stretch. So I just want to give you that unsolicited answer. Your blog posts are not going to get you into writing. You've got to write for editing and figure out how to do that. Okay, now let's go to your original question.

what topic? Well, look, you have to be well suited to write on the topic if you're going to be successful writing about it. That means one of two things. One subject matter expertise. So if you can find an intersection of your chemistry training and a topic that people care about or there's some audience that care about, that's great because you have expert training there. That's a great way to do it. The other option you have here is to have a compelling point of view about something that people care about, that you reflect in your own life and you're trying to get people to join your movement. So if there's something interesting or radical you do in how you live your life or in how you

stay in shape or you have some lifestyle built around reading three hours a day or that you should spend two days a week in the woods, you know, if you have some compelling idea that you convey in your life and you want to get people to join your movement and you're advocating for how you live your life, that's the other place. where you see success with nonfiction writing. So you kind of choose one of those poisons. I'm going to say poisons, options. Poisons is a chemistry joke.

But choose one of those options. Work on it. But again, it all comes back to it doesn't matter what you're writing about if the writing's not good. Your writing won't get good unless you're trained and you can't train by yourself. All right. I think we have time for one more deep work question. This one comes from Helen. Helen says, you often talk about the importance of metrics.

I wonder what to track when planning for a big project. I'm a solopreneur. There are many ideas that can potentially become real projects to pursue. My question is, what metrics should I use to evaluate if an idea has the potential to be turned into a successful project? Well, Helen, let's do a quick vocabulary thing here. When I talk about metrics, I mean more activities that you're tracking. So, you know, how many hours of deep work that I did do today? How many steps did I do today?

How many books did I read this month? That's how I use the term metrics. I think what you're talking about here is evaluation criteria. So if I have a project idea, it's one of 20 possible ideas. How do I know if it's the right one to do? Especially if, like, in your situation, you're a solopreneur that has a lot of flexibility. Well, there's an idea I want to put forward here that on the surface, just the name of it sometimes gets me into trouble,

but I think it's sound. This comes from So Good They Can't Ignore You, My 2012 Books So Good They Can't Ignore You, and it's the principle that money is a good neutral indicator of value. Now, this gets me in trouble because people sometimes interpret it as money is valuable. The more money you have or make, the more valuable you or what you do is. It's not what I mean.

What I actually mean by this idea, and this is not my phrase. This actually comes from Derek Sivers. In my profile of Derek Sivers, in my book, So Good They Can Ignore you is where this idea comes from. What he is saying is it is difficult to get good feedback on an idea from people. in your life, right? To say, what do you think about this? Should I do this? What do you think about my novel idea? You think this company idea is good? How about my band? Do you think I should make a go at it with my band? It's very hard to get good, neutral feedback from people that you know. They're going to be nice. So how do you really know if it's good or not? And he said, well, the one thing that people are honest about is

spending money. People do not like to give up their money for a good or service or entertainment unless they actually value it. So find a way to see if people will give you money. money for it and how much money they will give you. It's a great way of knowing if you're on to something and do this before you quit your main job. Do this before you make the radical change. So in Derek's life, he had this interesting progression. He was an A&R rep, and then he became a full-time musician, and then he became a full-time entrepreneur, and then he ended up selling that company. And this is how he made that transition, was doing this money as a neutral indicator of value test. He said, I'm not going to quit my job and become a full-time musician.

until I see that my side job as a musician is making enough money that that would be financially feasible. He said, that's a great test. If people are paying for my albums, if people are paying us to come play, then I must be good enough that this is a smart, it's worth at least, a reasonable at least to make a go at it. He then started his business on the side while a musician saying, I'm not going to really go all in on this business and quit being a musician until it's making enough money that it's financially feasible, and that'll be my indicator that I'm on to something with the business.

Now, the different scales of money we're talking about here depends. It depends on the type of work. So that's why this is not just a case of the more money you have, the better. No, it's for this type of good or service or entertainment I'm offering, am I getting enough people willing to pay enough money that tells me this must really be valuable. Now, what that amount is is going to be very different if we're talking about consulting services versus selling a artwork versus selling your music. So forget about the absolute amounts.

But is it for this type of thing I'm doing? Enough money coming in that says that I must really be doing something valuable. So I'm going to throw that out there, Helen. We have an idea for a new, let's say, consulting service. Let me see if I can get two clients that will pay for this and keep paying for it for more than a year. That means there must be some value here. You have an idea for a product.

Let's do a simpler version of the product that captures some of the main idea. Do it on the side and see if I can sell it. You want to write a book, see if you can get an agent that's willing to try to pitch it. Don't try to do an in-run and give a whole speech about, well, the gatekeepers are keeping me out, and I'm just going to do it my own way and self-published. Yeah, do that later. First, see if you can get an agent to buy the book, to take you on as a client. If not, they're not willing to give up their time and money to try to help you,

then maybe the idea is not there. So money is a great neutral indicator of value. Put together a test for your ideas that you care about to see if you can get people to pay for some version of them. That is how you will know with certainty whether or not what you're doing actually does have value. All right, that's enough about work.

Let's do some questions about the deep life. Our first deep life question comes from someone whose name I seem to have unfortunately lost when prepping this episode, but it's just soldier on with the question. This anonymous question asker says, how do you incorporate uncertainty

about reaching a goal into your long-term plans. I've been a distance runner for many years. I've been working hard to get faster. My ultimate goal is to qualify to run the Boston Marathon. This is a really tough thing to do, however, and I honestly don't know if I'm capable of it. I'm working with a coach and follow my training plan

and his recommendations to the letter. I suppose you could say that quarterly plans I've set for achieving this goal involve being able to meet certain pace time goals in my training and races. The issue is that no matter how diligently I'm, I work, there is always a certain amount of luck involved in hitting those goals, paces, and times. All right, well, here's the thing. And this is a good question because my answer is generally applicable to a lot of people who are thinking about bigger picture and ambitious endeavors. Your terminology here is way more goal-centric than I ever use.

If you go back and listen to some of the, even the earlier questions in this podcast, you'll see when I'm talking about your quarterly or semester plan. I'm talking about here's my vision for this quarter of semester, what I want to focus on that's going to help me make progress towards my bigger picture vision for what I'm trying to do in this part of my life. It's not a list of goals. This has to be something that gets translated each week into, okay, here's what I want to be working on each day so that each day you know what to do. So in your instance, you have this big picture vision of I want to run the Boston Marathon, right? But what is that more generally? More generally, it is I want to be the type of person who trains seriously for an athletic endeavor.

Okay, that's an important part of your identity. I think it's a good one. So when you're looking at a particular quarter, you say, okay, what do I need to be doing this quarter to make progress? Well, let's see, it's summer. And the marathons not until April. So in summer, I'm working with my coach on this type of training. Whatever is appropriate when you're eight months out from the Boston Marathon. I don't know running, but whatever, right?

I'm doing, I'm building up my distance. I'm working on my oxygenation. levels. I'm doing mafetone training. I mean, I don't know. Whatever it is, right? And I'm going to work with my coach to get a program for what I should be doing each week. Okay, when you get to each week, you see that vision. And then you're like, okay, well, here's a program I have for my coach. So let me slot that into my schedule this week. And then you know what to execute each day. Not really a goal-based vision. What is success? Success is to the best of your ability, given the circumstances, you were executing this plan you had for the

current quarter. Something changes. Let's say you have to travel a lot or there's a tragedy or you get sick and you miss out your training for a while. Then you just got to update that thing. Okay, given this, here's what I'm going to do instead. I broke my leg. Shoot. Not going to be able to be ready to run in the marathon in April. So now I'm going to change my vision and my plan now for this quarter is how do I keep in cardio shape with a broken leg? Well, I'm going to get one of these bike, hand bike things that, you know, baseball players use to keep their lungs good when their legs are hurt or whatever, right? I can do pool work. You adjust it.

Because the thing that matters here is that you have this general vision and you have a plan for how you want to make progress towards that vision and you're trying to execute that plan adapting it as needed. What's critical here is you're someone who's willing to train hard to keep your body in shape for something that's a challenge that you find is important. Whether you hit a particular pace time that your coach gave you this week or not because you had a cold or not doesn't play a big role in whether you're actually executing on that plan in a way that keeps you proud of your disciplined approach to try to make progress on

the things that matter. So I don't know if that's a little convoluted. Let me try to simplify this. I mean, basically, the goal is never goals. For the most part, I do not see things in terms of I want this to definitely happen. I have a vision of what I want my life to be like, and then I have a plan for what's the best I can do this quarter to make progress on it, and then I execute that plan to the best of my ability, modifying it if needed as circumstances change. It is the process of disciplined pursuit of a positive vision of your life.

It is that process that gives you all the value, not the particular item checked off of a goal checklist. Let's take a quick break from the questions to tell you about another sponsor that makes this show possible, and that is grammarly.

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which my studio overlooks in the evening. And so there's a really nice Caribbean beat that I'm hearing here as I record. You unfortunately will not be able to hear it because my audio guy set up some pretty aggressive gating on my audio processor. So that sound gets cut off before it makes it to tape. But just so you know, I'm kind of grooving here to some nice beats as I answer your questions. All right. Let's see. Here we got a question from Cole. I'll tell you one way I can tell I've been driving for 12 hours in the last two days is that I keep having to increase the font size on my question script here because my eyes are tired. I'm probably, I don't know, two questions away from having the old reading glasses out. All right, let's power through. Our next deep life question here

comes from Cole. Cole says, hi, Cal, can you go over some best tips you have come across for reining in notification settings on smartphones? How do we walk the line between being accessible but not overloaded? I don't want people to feel I'm ignoring them, but the idea of turning off all text notifications is alluring. Cole, you are not going to repair your relationship with digital devices with your notification settings. There is no number of clever small hacks about what notifications are turned off and on or whether or not you put your screen into grayscale or if you take all of the icons for distracting

apps and put them into a folder at the back page of your iPhone. if you get one of those apps running that for some reason shows you a tree that grows longer in between your uses of the smartphone, none of these type of hacks or tips by themselves is going to repair a broken relationship with your digital devices. If you feel overloaded by your phone, you've got to rebuild that relationship from scratch. You can't hack or tip your way into it. You need a philosophy or technology use that you believe in that reshapes that entire relationship. of course the philosophy I pitch is digital minimalism. So the most effective answer to your question, Cole, is read my book, Digital Minimalism.

I think I literally make fun of someone in that book for their article about turning off 126 notifications. The point I make in that chapter is this person was so proud about their idea to turn off a 126 different app notifications on his phone. He never stopped to ask why in the world he had 126 different apps asking for his. attention in the first place. So that book will get you some answers. Here's the TLDR on digital minimalism. You start by figuring out what it is you want to do in your life, what you want to spend time on what's important to you, and then you work backwards and say, okay,

for each of these things, what's the best way to deploy technology to support it? What tool do I want to use? And more importantly, what rules do I want to put around how I use this tool? This type of optimized rules for how you use tech that is working backwards from what you care about is how you long-term repair your relationship with technology because you are going towards a vision that is positive, not trying to avoid a behavior that is negative. We talked about this earlier in the podcast, but it is critical. You believe in a vision of your life, and that vision of your life requires you not to be checking text messages all the time. And that's going to be much more sustainable than if you just say, I don't know, I think I check my phone too much. Let me turn off the notifications.

Seek the positive. Don't just try to avoid the negative. So as you go through this exercise, probably relationships to family, friends, and community will be important in your life. But it's going to force you to start asking, well, how do I actually want to service these relationships? And there's a whole chapter in my book, digital minimalism about this. And what you're going to realize is that you know what text messages and WhatsApp chats, not conversation. It's just communication. it's better suited for logistical simplification.

Text messaging is great. When you're running late to meet a friend, you can quickly let them know you'll be there in 10 minutes and they can let you know where they're sitting in the bar. I'm glad text messaging interacts for it. The text messaging can't replace that conversation at the bar. And so you'll see in that chapter for this particular issue you're talking about with text communication notification that you can actually rebuild your social life about, sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of those you care about. Analog, real-world interaction is prioritized. You interact less, but that interaction is deeper.

Things like text message and email and social media becomes a tool of logistical convenience, not a primary mode of relationship maintenance. You do these types of changes just as a, for example, and your notifications don't really matter. They become superfluous. I have no idea what my notification settings are on my phone. I don't even know how to change that. It doesn't matter because I don't just fall into my technology and say,

man, how do I stay above water? I put that tech to use. So giving a bit of a rant here, Cole, because I'm trying to underscore a bigger point. We cannot fix our broken relationship with technology by fiddling around the edges with hacks and tips and tools and settings. We have to rebuild that relationship around something positive, all the different types of places that digital communication, technology, digital distraction, hit our life, and all of these places, we have to say, what do I really want here, and how am I going to use tech for this, and how am I importantly

going to use other things to get this value? How much entertainment do I want from my phone versus other means? How much interaction with people do I care about do I want to be on text message threads versus actually seeing them in person? Ask the questions, get the answers, put tech in its place. It's subservient to your vision of a life well-lived. You do that, and again, you don't have to worry about gray scale screens and turning off notifications and tree apps. It's no longer you trying to hold back all of this waves of tech that are crashing over you. It is you deploying the tech on the journey that you want to make. All right, let's move on to my next question.

Honest to God here, I just increased the font size on my questions again. So I had to increase it to 18 for the last question. Now my eyes are so strained that I'm up to font size 24. Or, you know, I think this room is too dark. I turned off, you know, I have these studio lights in here, and I turned off the lights that shine in my eyes because I'm not filming myself. It's probably also just too dark in here. But anyways, I now have a truly elderly book reader size font right now to get through this question. So Anonymous, who asked this question, I hope you appreciate the efforts I'm going through.

I should also say this was not an anonymous question, but the question asker identified specifically their name and their employer, and I took all that. out. So I have made this question anonymous. I don't want this person to get in trouble. All right. So the question asker says, what do I do? If I'm really good at something, I don't really care about anymore. I'm the lead designer at a software company. My question to you is simple. Lately, I have become disillusioned with the world of tech and design and realize that I don't want to do U.X design as my career. That work doesn't match the idea of a deep life for me anymore. Your books would tell me that the best way to transition is to leverage my existing capital towards a new skill that point in the direction of my new goals,

I want to write moving forward. So that would probably mean writing about design and what I know about it. I have capital and know people, but it's hard to do that if I don't really care much about it anymore. Do I just have to start building a new skill of writing about what I want to write about from scratch? Any thoughts?

Well, Anonymous, I will say some of my danger bells are starting to ring here. I sense from your question, someone who is about to quit a good job that gives them a foundation for a lot of different options to start writing full time without the training or without the feedback probably necessary to make a professional go at that. That's not going to end up well. So I'm going to give you four pieces of advice here. Look, it's clear you've read so good they can't ignore you. You have the basic concept here of career capital is important. Don't start from scratch. If you can leverage your

existing career capital, that's useful. But let's try to get a little bit more specific with your case so that hopefully we can draw out some generalizable, generally applicable idea. So first piece of advice I have for you, anonymous, you might want to actually put on the breaks here with this

career ideation where you're thinking about, I don't like this activity, I don't like doing UX design, I think I would like to be a writer. Put the breaks on that type of thinking and try about of what I call lifestyle-centric career planning.

This is where you work backwards from the lifestyle that resonates with you. You conjure up such a clear picture of what my life is like day to day and what this feels like. Where do you live? How much are you working? What type of activities are you doing outside of work? What is your relationship with communities or different types of hobbies? Do you have a vision where you know, you're overlooking a field in a sort of central mass style, idyllic, bucolic atmosphere? and you have this sort of small cabin house and you have extensive gardens,

or do you picture yourself, by contrast, you're in the city, and it's like a lost generation style sitting around the bar, sipping your absence, having big ideas and plugged into a cultural scene. I mean, whatever, just you come up with a vision of a lifestyle. Forget specific work for now. A lifestyle that resonates. What books have conjured this, what movies have conjured this, what documentaries have pressed buttons where you say,

how there's something there I like. all right, once you've identified that lifestyle, then work backwards. Okay, how do I do the work and more specifically finance aspect of this vision? All right, I want to live in a cabin in the woods, so it has to be work that I can do somewhat flexibly in location. If I go to this type of location, that's probably not so expensive if I can be working remotely. so I could have a job that was high pain, but maybe kind of part-time, and I could afford this land. And, oh, maybe what I'm really into is I get really, you know, I watch that Alex Honnold movie about his free climbing. I really love adventure climbing.

I do all this mountain climbing and stuff. And so maybe like North Conway in New Hampshire. So I want to be a part of that community in North Conway, this sort of emerging community of rock climbers and ice climbers that all live in. So, you know, you start to put together this image of where you're, you're going to be a part of where you. you live and you figure out how would how could work fit in that situation? What work would I need to support that? And it might be a question of like I need flexible work or I need to do this much work or I need to save this much money and then stop working altogether, whatever.

But go through that thought process because you have an incredibly valuable skill as a UX designer. You could probably do that remotely for another company. You could do that part time. You could do that as a consultant. And so good they can't ignore you, I talk about someone who got really. good at database development, and she would work six months on, six months off, different clients each time.

Her name was Lulu. And she put that skill to use, not to maximize how much money she made, but to support a lifestyle she wanted. And each of those six months off, she would do something else interesting. Sometimes she went back to Thailand where her family was from and spent months there. Other times she got her pilot's license. She learned to have scuba dive, right? So start with lifestyle-centric career planning, because what you might be missing, and this

is advice number two. is what you might be missing is the other buckets of the deep life are not being serviced, and that's what you're missing. And you're blaming it on the work. Well, I don't love this work. I don't love UIUX design. That must be why I'm unhappy. But you might be unhappy because the other buckets of your life, your soul, your mind, your community connections,

your sense of awe, your celebration and leisure activities. Maybe those are all withering, and that's why you're unhappy. So that's advice number two is work on these other buckets of your deep life more generally. you're building out this vision of what you want your lifestyle to be like then two more generally you're thinking about the non-professional elements your deep life bucket and say let me just get into that now and try to improve those as much as I can and think about what lifestyle might improve those even more so work on the non-professional stuff that might be a big part of your issue advice three if there's an alternative skill you're

thinking about working on like writing do that on the side say let's start building up that skill now I'll use money as a neutral indicator of value like I talked about in a previous question. And let's build up that skill. So we'll build up capital on the side. I'm not going to quit my job and go to the cabin and write. I mean, some people did it. Bill McKibben did it. He quit his job to go move to a cabin in the Adirondacks to write his first book,

The End of Nature, which was a big bestseller and supported his life as a writer going forward. But what's the job he quit? Oh, as a staff writer for the New Yorker. So he had some writing skill. Oh, and by the way, he got a large advance for that book, and the New Yorker had agreed to serialize it. So he wasn't exactly quitting his UI job to write his first book from scratch. He kind of knew what he was doing.

Advice number four, in general, think about going big with some of these actions, right? So if you want to start moving towards a better lifestyle, you want to start supporting the other buckets of your deep life, you know, especially if you're a young guy, you're single, move somewhere completely new. man, build a cool house that you custom build. Get that cabin, you know, in Bozeman, and you can't afford a big house there, so you build a cool one, an interesting place. Take up a radical new sport or hobby.

If you're working completely remotely, go to North Conway and do your ice climbing every day, you know, start training for some sort of crazy expedition that you're going to do and maybe record a podcast about it the whole way. I mean, I sense a hunger in you for something. And all of this advice, I think, is wrapped around the same concern is that you're putting all of this dissatisfaction. on the work. And the flip side is you're putting all this hope on if I change the activity I'm doing in my job, that dissatisfaction will go away. One of the key ideas in So Good They Can't Ignore You is that satisfying life is not typically solely determined by the actual content of the activity you do day to day.

And you want to see an extreme version of this. And again, excuse the rants. I haven't been able to record an episode for a month. So I'm working out some demons here. So anonymous, you know, anonymous. You know, this is not just about you. go and read, I wrote an article about this years ago, but go and read or watch. There was this TEDx speech that Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe from that old Discovery Channel shows Dirty Jobs.

He gave this great speech where he talked about follow your passion being crappy advice, I believe was his terminology. Why? Because he had done this show Dirty Jobs, where he literally was spend time with people that did, quote unquote, dirty jobs. These were skilled but working class jobs that were often sort of objectively dirty. so like septic tank cleaners, roadkill picker-upper, so like literally dirty, right? And he's like, I don't know, man, I'm around some of these people who love their life and love their work. Why? Not because they were born to be a septic tank cleaner, but because they have this really good septic tank cleaning business that they completely own.

And they've got a lot of time and a lot of autonomy and they're supporting their family. And they sponsor the Little League team and they have a lake house up in Maine. and that's a pretty fulfilling life. The content of the work in this case, who cares? Now, again, that's more extreme. Content can matter. Like, if you hate your industry, then, well, I don't know. If you don't like the company, don't work for that company.

You're like, eh, they're using their apps or corrupting youth or spreading disinformation that maybe you want to move to another type of company or do UX design for a company in a different sector of the tech sector. Like, there's stuff like that that matters with the content of your work. but all my advice is getting towards here is that all of the life surrounding the work matters just as much as the work itself. And work is often most effective in your life when it's being deployed on behalf of a very specific vision of a lifestyle, a very specific pursuit of all of the elements of a deep life. When it's being deployed as part of this big positive vision, that's where work can be successfully used. If you don't have this vision, then you might just be working as much as you can work,

taking the promotions because why not getting overwhelmed, getting unhealthy, just getting bored with the work. But when you know that, again, and I'm just using this example randomly, but whatever, I want to be a surfer on the Central Coast. I want to be an ice climber

living in North Conway in my spare time. I want to hit the white mountain peaks or whatever. You can tell I just got back from a New England vacation here. Once you know that, then you can start deploying the work. Oh, yeah. I work six months on, six months off.

I work three days a week completely remotely in this cool place. I start my own company and we're not trying to grow. We're trying to keep it at a very high price point. Like Paul Jarvis talks about in company of one so I can work a few months and take a few months off. However you want to do it, right? But now you know what you're doing with your work and the content of the work becomes a means to the ends of supporting the thing, the lifestyle you want. So if you hate what you're doing, then, okay, I get you need to change it. I just want to throw these other pieces of advice out there.

Answer all of these other questions first about your life. lifestyle and the other buckets. If you're interested in alternative skills, build them on the side until you're clear they're more valuable and be willing to take big moves on things that you control right now. I think you're craving in your life big moves. Maybe the first big move should not be quitting your job, but moving or changing where you live or picking up the big hobby. I think all of these things are going to help knock you out of the state you're in now

or at least help you get a lot more self-understanding of what's really going on here. Where really is your dissatisfaction coming from? All right. Let's do one more question here. I just turned on my overhead light, so I am actually reading this at a smaller font size than the last one. So progress here. This final question comes from Cordelia. She says, you use the analogy of a dumpster fire to describe challenging circumstances that we ought to take into consideration when planning our time blocks or setting goals and expectations.

But what about people whose lives are always in dumpster fire mode for reasons that are beyond their control? What if your dumpster fire is their normal? I am talking about people with chronic illness or huge financial challenges, etc. What practical suggestions you have to help people with difficult lives still make progress on long-term meaningful goals. Well, Cordelia, this is a great question. In the last year and a half, I have been using the dumpster fire analogy to talk about COVID-related work challenges. you know, at this talk I did recently in Boston, one of the people I was talking to after the talk was like,

look, I don't know, clearly frustrated and rightly so. How am I supposed to like make progress on goals and do deep work when, you know, I have multiple kids who are at home because their school is closed? You know? And that's an instance where my answer is, well, you don't really because it's a terrible situation and we should give ourselves a break because it is. And we should be upset that it's not being acknowledged. enough as being a terrible situation.

So the flip side of that dumpster fire analogy is that you give yourself a break. I've talked about this a lot in the podcast. I've had a really bad for me publishing year during the last year and a half. I wonder why. It has something to do with our schools being closed the entire time and kids at home, having the pandemic going on, right? So trying to give yourself a bit of a break. This is a unusual circumstance.

So you should not have the expectation of maintaining your, standard type of work during it. But the flip side of that is it's kind of annoying that this is not being recognized as such because it's unevenly applied. So for some people, the pandemic meant their schools were canceled, kids were home,

it's very difficult to get worked on. For other people, it's like, great, I don't have to commute and I'm doubling my productivity. And it's all being taken as like, there's no big issue, right? We had Zoom, so it's okay, the office was closed and,

oh, I guess this guy here is just doing much better than you. I think that's frustrating for a lot of people as well. So that's the flip side of the dumpster fire analogy. Now Cordelia, we get to your question is, yeah, but that's really for a short-term issue. You give yourself a break because you know things are getting better, just like things are getting better. Offices will be opened this fall. Kids are back at school this fall, more importantly. In fact, actually, I think a lot of people's ideal situation who are knowledge workers is like the schools are open, but we take our time coming back to the office.

Because it was a little bit unfair to give us the tantalizing glimpse of working from home and saying, oh, but here's the, here's the, here's the. twist, all your kids are there too. And so can we get just one month of being able to work from home without our kids being there? So maybe September will be that. I think a lot of companies are waiting smartly till October to open their offices. So can we just get one month of working from home when the home is quiet? Is that too much to ask? That would be nice. But Cordelia say, okay, what about people that you always have challenges like that? So you can't just write it off as like give yourself a break. You don't expect to do these meaningful hard goals during the bad times. If the

bad times are always going on. What should you do? Well, I mean, first, let's just acknowledge there's nothing easy about being in a hard situation. Often these situations can't be solved. They are rarely fair. Sort of like life's way of randomly kicking some people in the balls and not others. It's not fair. All right. So with all that established, you have got the proverbial kicking the balls, you know, from life. you're on the floor, what can we do in that situation? It's not ideal, but what are we going to do in that situation? Well, I got three quick things to recommend.

Just what I've seen in general, when I hear stories, people send me stories. I love hearing stories, and you can send them to interesting at calumuport.com. I can't promise I'll respond, but I read everything that comes into that address. People send me stories. And one thing I've learned from people who are in this, to use your terminology, Cordelia, persistent dumpster fire situation. I don't know if that's better than the proverbial kick in the balls. I think none of this language is great.

This is not Joan Diddy in here with my language craft right now, but whatever. Here's three things I've heard to be useful, and this is in order. Step one, taming the chaos. So not getting rid of the bad thing that's happening, but being extra diligent and disciplined about organization. Paperwork is organized. The calendar is taken. and the mail is getting handled. You have a spreadsheet to keep track of the different doctors that you need to hear from.

I mean, this stuff is a huge pain to have to do this on top of hard things happening. But there is incredible stress to ambiguity in open loops. If you don't have your arms around just the logistical challenges of your current chaotic state of life, it's incredibly stressful and it is very difficult to do almost anything else in that state of stress. But we sometimes call facing a productivity drag. And what is all the different stuff I have to figure out, what I don't understand, what I do understand, how do I, but just getting it all tamed. Task list, time blocking, an hour every day of just trying to get on top of things.

Maybe you have to spend 90 minutes every day on the phone, just trying to track down and understand, like, how do I actually get the SSI disability benefit here? I need to find that, keep calling people finding an expert. I have to write my own expert panel on how to navigate the hospital system because of this issue with a child's illness. It's a huge pain, but you're like, I'm going to invest huge energy. and just getting my arms around the chaos so at least we know what's happening we know the plan it's not open loops

it's not ambiguity it's not I know there's things that need to happen I don't know how it's going to happen it's an incredible stress reliever even if the stressful things in your life are still there all right step two

improved the situation and you can't solve the situation but you look for where there are things where I can now that I understand what's going on I face the productivity drag and now my arms around I understand what's happening maybe I'm spending half of my time

to do this sucks, but this is what's happening. Where is there room to improve? And that's kind of the next step. Like, okay, now that I understand this system and I'm dealing with an illness, I'm going to be able to get an in-house health aid. It's going to improve the situation. I now understand how to do that and how the insurance works. It's complicated, but I figured it out, so that's what I'm going to do now. Or there's something going on with caring for a family member. We're going to, we're going to change my job situation. I don't love it, but you know what? That's going to free up the time and suddenly this is going to be less impossible. We're going to move because

If we move to this school, they have better services. You know, have a child who's dealing with autistic spectrum, and this school has much better resources. We're going to move. Now, once you've tamed the chaos, you can look for places where you can make some improvement on the situation. Now, now there's some autonomy again. Now things are, it's not good, but it's not completely out of control.

Once you've done those two things, then in this type of situation, if there's kind of a persistent, bad thing happening, you can get to the final step, which is let me find something that is meaningful but non-urgent. Unrelated to the source of fire in my dumpster, unrelated to the proverbial

shoe that just hit me in the balls. This is the most ineligent terminology I've ever come up with. If I was, yeah, if I had not just driven for 12 hours, I would probably have a very poetic way of describing this. The, the turbulent wake of life's harbor of

of murky dismay. And what do I get instead? Kicking the balls and a dumpster on fire. So what you get, guys. I've been traveling for a while. But back to what I was saying, you find something unrelated to all of that. It's meaningful, not urgent, and you do it.

Now, how big that is is going to depend on just how much crap is in your life. And so it might be really small. You know, it might be 20 minutes every other day. It might be a very minor thing, but you're doing it on your own. It doesn't have to get down to you're doing it because it's something that makes your life a little bit more meaningful, a little bit more better. It's reaching out and helping this person. It's reading this poetry. It's writing your own short story.

It's this athletic training. You're finding the time to do in your own life. Now you have autonomy. Now you have hope. Now you see the ability to actually sort of find and extract good out of your life. an idea that comes out of post-traumatic growth the psychology literature on post-traumatic growth. Anyways, none of this

is gospel, I'm not an expert on it. I'm just saying this is what I've seen when I hear the stories from people. They're in a bad situation that sucks and they can't control it and how they prevent it from spiraling out of control. This seems to be a common pattern. Get tamed of chaos. It's going to take you way more

time than you hope to actually organize everything and be on top of everything but it's necessary. You improve the situation where you can. Now you're at the wheel. So you've gotten the car, the car is no longer spinning off the road, and now you can actually control the car, and then you start to do even just a little bit of work on something meaningful, non-urgent, unrelated to the crisis in your life. So that, your world includes that now. Doesn't fix the hard situation, but at least gives you the ability to, the ability to not just persist, but stand up tall among the hard situation. And again, I don't speak from main experience here.

I'm just trying to relay stuff. People I incredibly admire and impressed by their stories. I'm just trying to be the relay here. This is what I've heard. I can't speak from experience. I don't know if I'd be able to do it. Maybe I would succumb. But Cordelia, I hope there's something in there that you find useful because I think you can.

As the poet Byron once said, not even the flames of a dumpster fire can obscure the light. of an intentional life. All right, that's all I think I should be allowed to do this week. Thanks for listening to my triumphant return to Q&A recordings after a month off. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.