Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 119: Does Accomplishment Require Overload?

Episode Date: August 9, 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 DIVE: Does Accomplishment Require Overload? [3:16]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do you figure out what to get good at? [15:35] - Should I quit teaching to become a lifestyle coach? [23:24] - Why did I (Cal) become a computer scientist? [28;39] - How do I stop my firm from killing itself with email? [34:07] - As the multipurpose nature of computers a problem? [39:23] - What do I (Cal) think about four day work weeks? [41:30]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Should I reschedule miss deep work for later in the day? [46:56] - Do you (Cal) ever fix your big picture plans once in motion? [48"37] - Should I apply 4DX to my deep life buckets? [56:09] - How does one balance deep work with a partner who is equally as ambitious? [1:01:42]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 119. You can't see it, but I am wearing a nice shirt as I record this episode, as I'm going to have to pause this recording soon to do a TV appearance, and so I try to dress up for those. So if you hear me sounding a little bit more formal, a little bit more proper, that's the shirt. That's the shirt having an effect.

Now, this DeepWork HQ has been featured a couple times on TV, but not a ton. And so I guess it's nice to get some more air time for the HQ on TV. The only frustrating thing is, as you know or may not know, I'm continually upgrading my studio here. And I'm in the process of upgrading my studio to be ready for guests so I can film it. So I can post videos of my interviews with guests. That's the vision.

The final equipment for that arrived yesterday. So I have some very nice LED tube lights that the guy who helps me with this is going to install so that we can light this place professionally without having to take up floor space with light stands and my second camera arrived and my video switcher arrived so I can switch shots back and forth. Anyways, this is all here, but just a few days too late for me to have good lighting for this TV appearance. So, oh, well, quick update on all of that.

There'll be more I'm going to talk about this later. But part of the reason why I have upgraded the studio and in making it possible to record guest here is that there's this plan that's very well underway for a portal built around the notion of the deep life, which is really at the core of this podcast and a lot of my ride. It's going to be a very nice online portal. Now, I'm going to give a lot more details about this later that's going to have not just my full podcast, but in a Netflix-style carousels, you're going to get video clips of me answering individual questions. There's going to be my deep dives. There's going to be my interviews with other people.

There's going to be other interviews I've done on other places. There's going to be some video that I do off and on, little mini series, etc. That just show up on the portal. It's basically going to be a place where you want to go get an injection of deep life energy. And you want to get some audio, some visual, some red. There's going to be a one-stop shop for that. There's a lot of reasons why I think this is an interesting experiment.

Anyways, that's kind of coming. That's part of why I'm building out the studio to look nicer so that the video clips on this portal when it's launched, which should be in the early fall. all will look really nice. So there you go. That's a preview update. I will have more to say about that portal once it actually goes live.

All right, but let's get back to today's show. I brought back to deep dive. I had a topic I've been thinking a lot about, especially on vacation. So I figured let's do a deep dive and I can get some preliminary thoughts out. Very early stage on this idea I'm thinking about, but I'll get out some preliminary thoughts. If you have feedback, feel free to send that to interesting at Calnewport. All right, so let's get into it. The topic of today's deep dive is, does accomplishment require overload?

Now, here's the motivation. If we think about the concept of productivity right now, it has a really contentious, interesting place in our current culture, and it's because it encapsulates multiple dichotomies. The first dichotomy is that we feel great fulfillment in accomplishment, big accomplishment, small accomplishment, but we also feel great suffering and being overloaded. The other dichotomy is that we resist this idea that our lives should be these super optimized systems that seems somehow inhumane and yet being completely disorganized in our lives is incredibly stressful and inhumane on its own. So productivity right now, as we think about it in our culture, is riveted. with these dichotomies, which makes it complicated to think about it. So what I want to try to do in this deep dive is find at least one way to cut through these dichotomies. I'm going to do so with a notion that I've been thinking about recently.

I've mentioned this notion off and on in my newsletter. Over the summer, I was thinking about it a lot also on my recent vacation, and it comes down to the idea of fast versus slow productivity. Now, define fast and slow productivity. It's all about time scales. What scale are we focusing on with productivity? Now, we know productivity just as an economics concept is trying to maximize the output for the given inputs you have available. But what this looks like depends on the time scale we're talking about.

So fast productivity, my definition, is maximizing what you produce on the scale of days and weeks. Slow productivity by contrast is maximizing what you produce on the scale of years. So different time scales. Now once we make this differentiation, we see very different dynamics at play. Fast productivity really seems to work against our human nature. When you're trying to say, how do I maximize what I'm able to get done this week? You're moving quick. You're constantly shifting context.

I'm on my Slack jumping on here. Let me get on a call. Let me jump from this call to that call. let me fit this in before bed, let me load up my laptop in bed in the morning to get through these emails, it's constant contact shifting, lots of busyness, lots of action. The human brain's not great at that, right? The human brain prefers to go from one thing to another at a sustainable pace with some breaks often in between.

We don't do very well 75 contact shifts in the next hour. We don't do very well, zoom, zoom, zoom while doing email while trying to jump on an extra call along the way home, our brain is not meant to switch back and forth and not only switch back and forth so much, but have just sort of constant activity, constant activity, right? I think a lot of what we have in mind when we feel uneasy about productivity is really fast productivity, this idea of like, how do I maximize what I get done today? How do I maximize what I get done this week? Now, I was thinking a little bit about slow productivity. We're saying, I really, in the next few years, want to be proud of what I want to produce.

I want to produce some really good stuff, right? Because once you move the scale, it's the years, you're increasing the time scale. You're also implicitly going to increase the quality scale. All right. So when we're thinking about I want to accomplish things over years, well, what type of things register or that scale is going to be bigger accomplishment? You know, I want to write some good books over the next two years. I want to write some articles I'm proud over the next couple of years. So the quality scale goes up. Slow productivity tends to align much better with our human nature. It's seasonal on many different timescales. Like when you're working on something, you're very deep and lost in what

You're working on it can be very intense, but then you recover, and then maybe you're not working on it at all for the rest of the day. And maybe there's a month where you're working really hard on this thing, but then a month where you're basically doing nothing. So there's a seasonality at different scales, which is much more natural. We can get very intense. The human mind can intensely focus on something, but we can't intensely focus on things all the time. So there's this sort of natural rhythm that slow productivity aligns with that sort of rest and recovery and the ability to really just feel what's going on. You know, if you're going to hang out with a slow productivity master, like a novelist like John Grisham, that just writes one book every year or so, and that's all he does, you got to imagine there's days where he's pulling it back and days where he's pushing it forward.

You can kind of ride the rhythms. There's other writers, for example. Again, writers are great examples of slow productivity that are literally seasonal. I'm thinking like Simon Winchester, who goes out to this farm in western Massachusetts, and he has a converted barn, and he goes there, And a three-month period is where he really crafts his book and he writes a new book every two years. But then when he's outside that season and he's as an apartment in the city, then it's a different type of rhythm. You know, and it ebbs and it flows and it comes and it goes. So slow productivity can much more align with our nature.

Also, the things you produce from slow productivity tend to be much more concrete and impressive and unambiguously valuable. When you're in the fast productivity mindset, you're just always going. But the things you're quote-unquote accomplishing, it's like emails are getting answers. meetings are getting set up, memos are getting forwarded, calls are being jumped on, Zoom invites are being sent. But it's really hard other than just I went through a lot of things on my calendar to point to and say, I did this. Whereas when you're thinking about slow productivity, you're typically able to say, yeah,

I wrote this book. I did this article series. I produced this artwork. It's much more concrete. Our mind likes accomplishment, but we need concreteness really to extract that full satisfaction from accomplishment. So our accomplishment engine is not satisfied by I churned through 100 emails. But I went through 100 books and produced this really good article.

That's something we can point to. All right. So fast productivity works against our nature. Slow productivity aligns with our nature. Now here's the issue. These two notions of productivity are at odds with each other. If you're trying to emphasize slow productivity, you have to de-emphasize fast productivity, A mindset of trying to get as much stuff done,

a busyness, constant action mindset on the scale of days and weeks, rips away all of that type of slow time you need to actually do the deep efforts demanded of slow productivity. So if you're going to focus on fast, you're not going to do slow. If you're going to focus on slow, you have to be very wary of fast because you need the breathing room. You need the space. You need the margin. So they're at odds.

All right. So what is a driven person supposed to do? Someone who says, look, I want to get after it. I just feel this itch to do something. I feel this potential. well, we do this quick assessment of these two types of productivity, and we kind of come to the conclusion that probably focusing more on slow productivity is going to be more sustainable and more fulfilling in the long term.

And this means maybe moving your attention away from fast productivity, can I really move as much stuff through the pipeline this week as possible as less important? Instead, what would I need to do to produce something I'm really proud of this year? It's a completely different question, and the answers look also completely different. All right, now here's where we can untangle the other dichotomy here about disorganization itself being stressful. What about all the stuff that remains? Just because you're focusing on some big things that you want to make progress on on the scale of years, there's still bills to pay. And there's still clients that maybe need to hear from you because of your consulting job.

And John Grisham still has to talk to his publicist. And his nice little writing house in Charlottesville that's outside of his main house gets leaked sometimes. and he has to deal with contractors. I mean, it's not like you can turn off other stuff. Well, if you know your emphasis is on slow productivity, then the game for everything else can become not, how do I do more of this, but instead what I call sufficient organization.

So you can reduce and automate what you can, the stuff that remains, you want to organize it with your systems and where it goes and how you deal with it. Why? So you can get more done? No, so that you can reduce the footprint of these other tasks that you can avoid. So their footprint on your schedule is reasonable, therefore leaving you the breathing room you need

for the natural ebb and flow of slow productivity. I'm interested in this model, and again, I think it cuts through a lot of the confusing dichotomies about productivity to emphasize slow productivity and apply sufficient organization to everything else that remains. For a lot of people, that might be a pretty sustainable approach to a life of accomplishment and fulfillment

and all other sorts of things that we might want in our lives. So now suddenly when you're, when you're time blocking, for example. You're doing multi-scale planning, the type of stuff I recommend. You can look at that through the lens of sufficient organization. I want to make sure that the other stuff

that needs to get done, I try to reduce and I automate, I do as much that I can, but the stuff that still needs to get done, I want to control it, I want to minimize its footprint, I want to know where it is, I want it off my mind,

I want to control my time. So when I'm working, I'm working and getting that stuff done soon, so I have more breathing room. I don't want it to take over my life. I don't want to metastasize is where suddenly the ideas in my book,

a world without email, become really poignant. You're like, oh, man, if I'm if I'm communicating with my team and clients with the hyperactive hive mind, I'm going to have to constantly be context shifting. I'm going to be constantly in the way of slow productivity. So let me get better processes in place. Processes that eliminate unscheduled messages that make the work I'm doing more concrete and structured. That's footprint gets much more limited and now I have more breathing room. So I can work on the big client vision and not just trying to answer client emails. so I can write the 10x code and not be trying to go back and forth with HR about the changing parking requirements or whatever.

Anyways, this is a rough concept, but some of this terminology is helping me think about this world a little bit better. It's maybe helping me think about productivity better. Slow productivity is critical for a lot of people. I want to be over time in the long term producing stuff that I'm proud of. A lot of people have that urge. I have that urge. It's incredibly human and fulfilling to go after that. Everything else, treat with wariness.

Kind of want to get rid of stuff or automate stuff. If I can auto bill pay, let's do that. If I can hire an assistant to do the paperwork, let's do that. Okay, what's left? Let's be super organized about it. Why? Again, not because of fast productivity. Not because if I'm organized, I can get 10 times more done.

It's because if I'm organized, I can get it done in 10 times less time. that logistical detritus that is unavoidable, I can make that into a compact orbit so that the rest of my proverbial productivity solar system here can operate without friction. I mean, look, this is a terrible analogy, but I think you see what I'm trying to say here. All right, anyways, rough ideas,

but hopefully there's something here that's useful. Of course, basically all office cultures, especially the university culture where I'm in, creative cultures, creative industries. All of these things are set up to kind of push you back towards a fast productivity mindset. It's not so easy to necessarily do that,

but that's a topic for a different day. Let's just introduce these aspirational notions today and let them marinate and see if at the very least they help us make better sense of these conflicting feelings we have about accomplishment and overload, about over-optimization and chaos. All right, that's enough for the deep dive. Let's do some questions now.

We will start, as always, with questions about deep work. I should probably note before we do this first question here, that in between the deep dive and now I jumped on and did my CNN appearance, all without having to leave the same seat. This is really something I hope we preserve once the pandemic is fully in our rearview mirror, this idea that's comfort with TV producers having and radio producers with, I don't know, people have. have pretty reasonable setups.

We don't have to bring them into a studio. I've spent my share of time in studios, my share of time in green rooms. It's a huge time suck. I think you would probably get more interesting people on more often if we could do it remotely. So I hope this sticks. But enough of that. Let's move on with our first question.

And I do mean first. So just the other day I sent out to my mailing list, the latest survey to gather questions for this podcast. And this was the very first question. question number one. And just so you can be ready for it, this is one of three career-related questions I'm going to do in a row. I got a lot of career questions early on in the survey, so I thought I would do a little question cluster here. All right, so the first question here comes from Isabel. Isabel asks, how do you figure out whether a field is an auction market or a

winner-take-all market, and what type of capital should you be aiming to acquire? If you don't recognize those terms, they come from my book so good they can't ignore you. One of the central ideas of that book is that if you want to be passionate about your career, you should try to develop career capital that is rare and valuable skills and then use those skills as leverage to push your career towards what resonates away from what doesn't. Put simpler, you have to be really good at something before you can expect really good attributes to your work. in the book, in one of the chapters I talk about,

there being different markets for your career capital, the different types of careers. The winner take all market was my terminology for a career sector in which there is a clearly defined competitive structure. It's pretty clear what it means to be better than someone else and what you have to do to get to the top and what it looks like when you're at the top. And if you want to do really well, build a cool or good or passionate career in those fields, you have to really focus relentlessly on becoming so good you can't get ignored in those key

clearly identified skills. I mean, obviously, if you're like an athlete or a professional chess player, it's very clear what you need to do, but there's a lot of sort of knowledge work jobs where this is true as well. If you're a lawyer and a law firm, it's billing numbers. If you're in sales, it's commission size, how much sales are you actually doing, etc. The other market for career capital I call an auction market. And here the idea is what you offer is a, unique combination of skills.

So what gives you leverage in the market is not that in this one skill that's clearly defined, I'm better than most people. It's instead, I have a combination of skills that I'm good at that is unique. No one else has that combination of skills. That combination of skills has a value to offer and therefore I have leverage in the market. There's just two different types of market for career capital, depending on which market you are functioning in, it depends on how you think about skills in your work life. So, Isabel, if you're asking which type of market you're in, it's probably an auction market. If your particular job was in a

winner take-all market, you would know that. It would probably be pretty clear. This is how you move ahead. This is what we care about. You know, how many hours are you billing? How many academic papers are you producing? How many citations are you getting? What are your sales numbers? It would be pretty clear. There would be not a lot of ambiguity about what matters. And if you're in one of those type of markets, then what you've got to figure out is how do I deliberately practice the thing that matters. Push the distractions aside, find the skills that matter, be willing to do the deliberate practice when you stretch yourself past your comfort zone to see how far you can push yourself, be so good you can't be ignored. You're in an auction market. Okay, things get a little bit more

complicated. Now, I might push you to my interview with Dave Epstein, this would have been earlier in the summer, I suppose. And Dave wrote this book, range that's basically an ode to the auction career capital market approach to your careers where you build up multiple skills and are pleasantly surprised by the unique combination of these skills that opens up cool things in your life. The main danger with the auction market is falling into dilettantism, where you use the excuse of, well, you never know what's going to be useful

and where I'm going to find my unique combination of skills. Use that as an excuse to never really make a move or to push something to a place where it matters. You just constantly experiment with things a week here, a month here, a half of year here, and nothing ever happens. If you want to be successful in an auction market, there's a few things you have

to do. One, when you're building a skill, you've got to build it relentlessly with deliberate practice. It's just that you can stop once you get to a non-amature, like, proficient level. You don't have to be the best ever. So it's still not easy. You still have to have the mindset of how do I get really good at this thing? And that requires focus and deliberate practice.

You're just falling short of how do we become the best in the world of this. So like now you can spend a year working hard on something instead of 15. But it's not, oh, I never have to work hard at things. So that's important. Two, you need to be shipping all the time. And by shipping, I mean trying to actually produce things, get it out there. I produce this report. produce this product, I produce this work of art. It's the actual construction and shipping of

things that not only pushes your skills, but uncovers these interesting combinations and gives you feedback on what combinations are useful and what you need to do to make them more useful. So again, you can't just sit around. I'm reading this and taking this great course and doing this online course. You never know. You don't actually be putting the skills you have to productive use to see what actually happens, what's generating some friction, what's actually sparking a little bit of a flame. And then three, if you want to succeed in the auction market, when something seems to have traction. So like for Epstein, for example, he talks about how he was a master student in science and then transitioned over to journalism. And then pretty soon, I think at Sports Illustrated,

again, go back to the interview, we get into this. Pretty soon, I think at Sports Illustrated, he realized there was this interesting combination where he could do sports reporting with a science angle and it worked and there was a need for it, right? When you get evidence, because you're out there, you're building skills, you're producing things to see what works, what does it. When there's evidence that you have a combination

that's working, all right, you've got to take off the dilettant hat and say, I'm going to hardcore focus on this combination and make a run at it. So as a final key part of the auction market is that it's still really hard to polish your unique combination of skills that produce things,

with them that are very valuable to increase the value of what you are producing with this combination of skills. Again, none of this allows you to avoid the hard work of deliberately building skills, deliberately with focus, applying those skills and producing things. And that's the one issue I have with the auction market. I love that approach. I actually think it's for most people probably better than a winner-take-all market, especially if you don't have some sort of natural talent that gives you a heads up in a winner-take-all

market. I really like the auction market, but my issue with it is is misunderstood. And if you allow that be the thing that avoids you from ever having to focus or do deliberate practice or stretch yourself or take swings or take risk, if you allow it to be what allows you to just sort of follow what's interesting in the moment to embrace dilettantism, then you're going to get stuck. So it's different than the winner-take-all market. It opens up many more options. I think it's interesting. But in the end, you're still like a slow productivity play.

focusing on things you want to get better at, giving them really big focus over a long period of time, trying to produce things, focusing on what matters, reducing the distractions that don't. All of that's there. It's just the path you follow is not as well mapped out before you get started.

All right, now that I bother to review career capital theory, let's do another career capital related question. This one comes from Mary. Mary says, you've mentioned that it takes roughly 10 years to build career capital. You've also mentioned that one shouldn't hastily walk away from a career, but rather transition over time.

Do you have any tips for doing this? I am a public school teacher and I was disenchanted with public education after being a part of a system that encouraged students to learn less rather than teaching the skills to be successful in any situation. I have recently got a couple of breaks in the starting a general service company that would range from grant writing to serving legal documents to tutoring to resume building. However, I would eventually like to get into lifestyle and health coaching. I only just found a healthy lifestyle that is foolproof within the last year.

Well, Mary, I think career capital theory will help clarify a lot of these questions for you. And again, the idea is that as you develop rare and valuable skills, you acquire more of what I call career capital. This career capital, you can then invest to get into your work the traits that make great work great. And so this is what I mean when I say you should, the quote you here, not hastily walk away, but transition over time. what I really recommend the people is keep that in mind. The less capital you have in your current career, probably the worst it's going to be because you have less leverage. You have less you can invest to get back good traits. So be very careful about leaving a career in which you've built up a lot of career capital and going to a career where you have none.

I think we focus too much, I think, on the sources of our discontent. I mean, you're emphasizing here that there's something about public school teaching you don't like. Right. So you have this discontent. And then you figure a work that doesn't have those negative traits is going to be better. But I think what you're discounting is that a lot of what makes great work great is you being great. In other words, it's career capital at play. The more rare and valuable your skills, the more leverage you have for things like autonomy, for choice over what you work on, for a sense of mastery, for connection, for impact, for creativity, for being around other people. You can build great relationships for the more career capital you have, the more access you have to those properties. So if you're walking from a high career capital situation to a low career capital situation, you got to be wary. And so, yes, you might be walking away from a particular thing you dislike about your current job. But if you're walking into a job where you have very little capital, there's going to be a ton more things you dislike there, if not more.

And this is why I'm a little bit nervous about what you're talking about here. General service company seems like the opposite of building a rare and valuable skills you can use as leverage. I mean, some of the things you're talking about here, like serving legal documents or resume building, they do not require a lot of career capital. It's not a rare and valuable skill. You're going to have to build up over a long period of time. And if you do not have a rare and valuable skill to offer an exchange, you really should not expect from that job the type of things that makes great work great. Autonomy, financial security, mastery, impact, etc. So I would just see all of this through the lens of career capital.

If you really wanted to leave teaching, which is fine, you can A, say, is there a job I can go to that actually leverages the capital I built. as a teacher, a place I can go that requires the type of training and experience I have, but that sidesteps some of the negative things about being in a school. That's a smarter transition because now you have all this capital you can still leverage and get a lot more out of that job, be it money or flexibility or mastery or whatever, than starting from scratch and saying, I'm going to serve legal documents or I'm going to do, you know, resume building. If you want to move to something different, then I would say focus more, because again,

the more rare and valuable, the skill you more you get out of it. So don't spread yourself thin. Maybe say grant writing, okay, if that's going to be my thing, then how do I become an exceptional grant writing in a sector in which there's not a lot of grant writers and I really deliver. It might take me three years to get there. Or if I want to do tutoring, how do I build a tutoring business that is hitting a market need and I'm so good, I can't be ignored.

It's, you know, people are knocking down the doors. I have to triple my rates. It might take years for you to get there. but focus on becoming so good you can't get it, be ignored, and a very small number of things, if not one. And then when you see that's producing money on the side, when you run your tutoring business in the summer, it is six months' salary.

When you're grant writing, you have more work, you're doing on the side, and you can only do one at a time, and you have a waiting list of four companies who want you, four nonprofits that want you or whatever. And then you know, okay, now it's time to make the switch. I just don't want you, Mary, what I don't want you to do is start fixating on elements of your

job you don't like and then telling yourself the story that if I just leave this right now in the act of leaving, in the act of getting away from this property I don't like, I'm going to be happy. Career capital theory, and I don't mean to keep hitting on this idea, but I think it's really important. That's why I keep emphasizing. It says it's all in exchange. The more valuable you are to the market, the better your job you can get. And if you're not offering something valuable, you really just, I can't expect much out of it. So think about things through career capital. and I think you're going to see many options arise that are going to be quite sensible, and yet still accomplish your goal of getting away from the things that right now seem like they're probably draining for you.

All right, let's do one more career question. This one comes from Nick. Nick says, can you describe how you chose academic computer science as your profession? What drew you to study it and how early did you realize it was something you wanted to follow? In his elaboration, Nick was asking this in particular because he was wondering about my advice, and so good they can't ignore you about pre-existing passions being overrated and career capital be more important

and he wanted to know was I a counter example to my own book? Did I follow my passion in the computer science and therefore what does it say about my theory? Nick, my story to computer science is not that compelling. You know, I was into computers as a kid probably because my mom was a computer programmer

so I was exposed to it. And so that was one of my hobbies and I was good at it, right? I think by high school I was proficient in at least a half a dozen different computing programming languages. Instead of having a normal summer job, I actually did computer programming for a consulting firm. So I was working in an office park. It was actually kind of depressing. I finished all the computer science courses at my high school by my sophomore year. I took the AP computer science course. Then I had nothing to do. So they eventually let me take computer science at Princeton, which was nearby and had an

agreement with my high school. So, you know, I was a computer guy like computer science, but I wasn't only a computer guy. I mean, I wasn't one of these super tech nerd types, AV club types. I was also in a rock band. I ran a company. It was a varsity track athlete. So I had a lot of other stuff going on as well. So I go to college. I just figured it's as good as anything else. And honestly, that's the way I thought about it. You know, okay, I need to major in something. I'm good with computers, so why not do computer science? I also minored in art history, right? Just kind of arbitrarily, it just seemed like I'd never been to a place like Dartmouth, like one of these northeast elite school campuses. This was all foreign to me.

So I thought, I don't know, if you're at a place like this, you should be in a dark room looking at slides of Manet, right? I don't know. It just felt like to me that was something you do if you're at one of these old crusty New England institution. So I was almost actually an art history major. I think I just fell a couple courses short of that. Again, it was kind of arbitrary. And then in school, I also spent a lot of time writing. And I'm probably more famous now.

I mean, I know I'm more famous now for writing than I am computer science. So who knows, right? This is what I'm trying to say, Nick. I'm not going to try to re-engineer into my life some sort of narrative of I knew from day one. This is what I wanted to do. And I did it. And that's why I'm happy. I followed my interest.

I took swings at things. I think more importantly, once I committed to something, I would go all in on it. My path still took turns I could have never predicted before. That's pretty much par for the course. which is why I tell people, don't worry so much about figuring out in advance exactly how your life is going to go. Pick interesting things with big potential. Go all in.

Put your head up. See where you are. Adjust, repeat. And you'll end up in interesting places. I want to take a moment to talk about one of our sponsors, Monk Pack. Now, here's the thing. At the moment, I'm being very careful about my food.

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Returning to our questions, we have one now from Mike. Mike says, within my firm, we are killing each other with email. Everybody agrees that their inboxes are a drain on their productivity, yet they are all resistant to trying something new. I feel like the building is burning. We have an escape ladder and everyone is content to stay in the building. What are the one or two most compelling arguments you usually make to open people's eyes that the convenience of email is being confused for productive communication? Well, Mike, in my experience, the key here is to stop talking about email. If you say to someone, ah, email is a problem.

Here's immediately what their mind thinks about. Fifteen different interactions that happened over email that day that were critical. A question to a client, setting up a meeting, and they think, if I did not have email today, those 15 things could not have happened. It would have been a disaster, and they're right. You don't come to someone and say, man, I really dislike email. You instead go underneath to the underlying workflow causing the problem, which is the hyperactive hive mind. you say what is the main way we have decided to work together, to collaborate together and share information. And well, if we haven't discussed this openly, the implicit answer is probably the hyperactive high vine.

We just send things back and forth, ad hoc unscheduled messages, email, Slack, teams, whatever tool you use. But ad hoc unscheduled messages back and forth is how we work most things out. Let's give that a name. We'll call it the hyperactive high vine. We can all agree this is basically how we work most things out. And it has advantages. It's flexible and it's convenient and is cheap. The only software you have to buy is email.

The only tool you have to learn is email, and you can just figure things out on the fly. What is the potential problem with the hyperactive hive mind? It's the context shifting. You know, if I have a back and forth conversation I'm having with you via email to try to figure out what time we should propose to the client to jump on a call, that conversation maybe has to get done today, right? Like, we have to get that done by the end of the day because the client, needs a response.

And let's say there's five back and forth messages that this conversation has to create. Well, I can't wait three hours between each of these messages because we're not going to be at the office 15 hours today. So I kind of need to see when the next message in this conversation comes in. I need to see it pretty quick so that I can hit it back to you and you can hit it back. We can kind of get this thing worked out in time. But what does that require? Oh, I got to keep checking.

I don't know when it's coming, so I got to keep checking. So now suddenly this one conversation, we're trying to set a time for a client meeting. Generates five messages. Each message generates 10 inbox checks. 50 inbox checks have just been generated by this one conversation. Now here's the thing. There's probably two dozen different conversations going on right now. As a result, the hyperactive hive mind requires that you constantly check these channels. And our brain simply can't do that. The key thing to emphasize here is it takes up to 15 minutes for you to shift your focus from one thing to another.

So if you glance at an inbox once every six minutes, you're making yourself dumber. Your brain is in a state of confused context shifts that reduces your cognitive capacity. It also exhaust your brains while you're by 3 o'clock you're done and you can do nothing but check emails and it makes us anxious as well, right?

What I'm trying to do here, Mike, is take the focus away from the tool and put it to the workflow. Because if you told me Gmail killed my boss's mother and we're not allowed to use email in this office and all of our communication is done on telegraph machines,

we all have a telegraph key in our office and we all have to learn Morris code, and yet you were still using the hyperactive hive minds. You're just constantly listening to Morris Code and hitting out Morris Code. It's the same problem. The problem was not the tool.

It's that constant back and forth unscheduled messaging is how you're getting things done. Once people recognize that the hive mind is the problem, not email. I have a contract to send you. I want to attach it to an email. I don't want to fax it to you. Great.

That's not the problem. The problem is everything has been worked out with unscheduled back and forth messaging. Now you have a villain that you can actually identify. Once you've identified the villain, you can actually fight it. So that's the way I would say to do it, Mike, is it's workflow-centric.

This is our workflow. We should think about finding different things we do again and again in this company and seeing if we can put in place alternative workflows that don't require so many unscheduled messages. So I really think this whole battle with email is about identifying the right villain,

which is the hive mind and the context switching it happens, identifying the right hero, which is alternative workflows that require much less context shifting, much left unscheduled messages. And once those grounds are set, then lots of innovation is possible. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit. Oh, let's use meeting software for this, and let's make the clients on a regular schedule,

and let's just have a standing thing where we deal with all these issues, and let's generate a special email address for this type of thing, so it's not individuals being talked to individually. There's a questions at company.com or whatever, right? I don't know. The innovations can look different depending on what you do, but you have to know what the villain is and what the parameters of the hero is. Once you do that, then you can actually innovate.

So I guess the glib answer is give them my book, but the more specific answer is stop talking about email and start talking about the disastrous workflow that followed in emails wake. Set their sights on the right villain, they'll start to take some actual shots. We got a question here from Sergei. Sergei asks,

do you think that worst focus and deep work enemy, that the worst enemies of focus and deep work are not the messenger software itself, but computers as multi-tools. A long time before, we got computers in our offices in our homes. We used to have tools on demand, making answering calls, sending letters. Nowadays, all these tools are mixed up in the worst disruptive way. Well, Sergi, I talk about this effect in digital minimalism. There's a chapter where I get into this.

And basically what I argue is something that is quite in line with what you're implausive. here in your question, which is the ability for computers to do lots of different things is a benefit but also a liability. The issue now becomes, when I'm on this computer doing X, I can also be doing W, Y, and Z. And those are right there. And they can be running in parallel at the same time, notifying me and letting me know that it's going on. And that is not congruent with the human brain, which is much better at doing one thing at a time. So, so bespoke tools have that advantage. that I'm now going over, I'm putting this tool away, I'm going to go get this tool and fire it up.

This is the thing I'm doing. That's the cognitive context I'm setting, and I'm all focused on that. I can do it really well. The computer screws with all of that context. It's like, I don't know, I'm on the computer. There's 20 things I could be doing here. So it's very hard for your brain to get in the mindset

of we're doing this one thing. So yeah, I do think the multi-tool, as you call it, aspect of the computer. I call it the multitasking capability of the computer. There are some side effects of that that we didn't think about. I mean, there's obviously benefits as well. the whole reason behind personal computers was, hey, one device can do lots of different information processing tasks

and very cost effective. Let's just have one device and you can change the software to do different things. I mean, that intuitively makes a lot of sense, but we just have to be careful about the side effect of that, which is once one thing can do lots of things, you're never just doing one thing when you're dealing with it. I don't know the answer here, but it's something I think is definitely worth keeping in mind. Let's do one more deep work question. This one comes from Emily. Emily asked what

my opinion is on the idea of having a four-day work week. Now interestingly, I somewhat frequently see my name cited in articles about four-day work weeks. I'm often cited as a proponent of this idea. I think it's because I talked about four-day work weeks in my book Deep Work. To be technical here, I wasn't actually saying four-day work weeks are good. The reason why I talked about them in deep work is there was an experiment that Jason Freed ran at his company base camp where they would switch to four day work weeks for the summer. And what he found is the same amount of work got done. And I cited this reporter that had pushed back on Jason and said, well, wait a second, you're just forcing your workers to work even longer on those four days to make up for the fifth day. He said, no, I've been measuring it.

They're working the same hours on those four days. So we really have reduced their amount of work by 20 percent and they're getting the same amount done. what was really happening. They were just respecting each other's time more, so they were doing less meetings, they were doing less shallow work, they were focusing more on the things that mattered because they felt like they had less time. And I use it as an example of we have probably too much shallow work in our life. But what do I think about that as a general strategy? Should we all be doing four-day work weeks? I mean, I'm somewhat agnostic on it because the general category of solutions that the four-day workweek falls into are what I call top-down workplace solutions.

and I'm not too enamored with this category. The way top-down workplace solutions work is that you find something you don't like about work, and you say, well, our solution will be, what if we said basically we don't do that or we do less of it? So you feel overworked, and so you say, well, what if we worked less days and just made that a policy? Or like in France, there's too much email, so what if we passed a law that said, you can't send emails to your employees after 5 p.m. or something like that. the issue of top-down solutions is they have a hard time actually working

because they don't fix the source of the original problem you're trying to solve. It only makes sense. They only make sense in a sort of simplistic conflict theory influenced world where these bad things you're trying to solve are arbitrary. They're there because of just bad people trying to exploit you so we can, through worker uprising or legal maneuvers, basically stop the bad people from doing the purely bad.

bad thing. You're overworking me because you're twisting your mustache and your evil. And so we're going to demand the four-day work week and take that villain. And now you can't make us work so much anymore, right? Or you're making us answer emails after work because it's part of your evil plan to turn puppies into jackets. And we're going to pass a law. So take that bad guy, right? The reality is usually more complicated. Why are we so busy in work? Why do we get so many emails? I mean, it's not usually a villain twisting their mustache. It's usually things like inefficiencies or ineffectiveness and how we conceive of work and how we structure work and how we organize work. The type of stuff I talk and write about a lot.

So I'm not so interested in the top-down solutions. I like the bottom-up solutions. For example, get rid of the hyperactive hive mind. Guess what? A lot of these issues go away. Get rid of the hyperactive hive mind and you don't have to answer emails after five because there's just not enough urgent unscheduled emails to be answered in the first place. Or maybe you move to something like results-only work.

I had a New Yorker article recently about so-called results-only work environments. I'm fascinated by these work environments. They're hard to set up, but once you set it up, where you work, when you work, and how you work is up to you and doesn't really matter. So you don't need a four-day work-week requirement in a row, a results-only work environment. You come the office when you want to come to the office. You need to take a day off. You can still get your work done. You still get your work done.

If you have too much work, you're negotiating clearly about here's exactly what I'm doing for you. too much. I like bottom-up solutions. I like solutions to get at how does work actually happen? How do we assign it? How do we track it? How do we organize it? How do we execute it? And do we like the answers to those questions? If not, how can we do them better? And again, I think a lot of the issues that the top-down solutions ineffectively try to solve become irrelevant if you get the bottom-up solutions done correctly. So, I mean, I get it. There's a lot of appeal to the top-down solutions because they're simple and they seem like they would just directly get rid of or reduce something you don't like.

But if you don't correct the underlying source of the thing you don't dislike, now it's just creating friction. You know, you say, can't email after this hour, but your whole work functions by back and forth emails. Stuff doesn't get done. People have to do it kind of secretly to keep their jobs. It's not good. So you don't have to work on Fridays, but nothing else changes about how work is assigned

and tracked and loads. And you still have to secretly work on Fridays anyways, because otherwise you don't, you're not going to have the client presentation done by Monday. So I like bottom up. I mean, again, the villain twisting their mustache that we get them with our sort of new top down rule, I just, I think it's satisfying, but I think it's a little bit, it can be a little bit naive. So I'm a big fan of fix how work actually happens in a way that's sustainable, that people,

that is sustainable for workers, is psychologically satisfying and highly productive, do those things. and then a lot of these top-down fixes become no longer relevant. All right, that's enough talk about work. Let's do some questions on the deep life. Our first deep life question comes from Rachel. Rachel says, if you do not get your deep work done when scheduled, do you work longer hours in order to make up for it?

Thereby cutting the family non-work time. Rachel, no. I mean, unless there's a deadline and I have no choice, I am a big proponent of what I call fixed schedule productivity. I figure out in advance this is when I'm going to work and then I do whatever is needed to make my work fit into those boundaries. And so if things kind of fall apart, then yeah, then maybe I just get less work done. But I very rarely would push my work later into the evening or into weekend days when I wasn't planning on working. I let work happen where I have scheduled work to happen.

I think this is really an instantiation of slow productivity. So the idea I talked about in the deep dive that opened this episode, when you really care about what's produced on the scale of many months or even on the scale of years, whether or not you hit a certain hour amount on Tuesday matters less. Certainly not enough that you're going to take away time from your family. What matters is just the discipline of coming back to the hard things that matter again and again, to the best of your ability.

it's not always going to hit right. Sometimes you work more, sometimes you work less, sometimes you're locked in, sometimes you're sick, okay. But if you aggregate these good faith, disciplined efforts over month and months, a book comes out,

a paper comes out, a big article comes out. And so I think fixed schedule productivity, when combined with slow productivity, gives you breathing room and yet still allows you to produce things that matter. Santiago asks, do you ever significantly change your,

yearly or quarterly plans once they are in flight. Well, I don't have a formal annual planning system, but I do have a quarterly semester planning system. Every semester I make a plan for the different areas of my life. So a work plan and a personal life plan for that upcoming semester, or you can call it a quarter if you're in the business environment. As I talked about, and I really recommend you go back and listen to last Thursday, listener calls mini episode. I believe I went through an ontology of my multi-scale planning very

carefully, daily, weekly, quarterly semesters. Like, I really walked through it very carefully. So you go back and reference that if some of these terms don't make sense. As I talked about in that episode, my semester slash quarterly plans, they sometimes will have a vision. I say sometimes. I mean, they always usually have a vision. Like, this is what I'm looking for in my professional life. Here's my vision. Here's what I'm looking for in my personal life. Here's my vision. And these are influenced by a values document. And again, listen to the that Thursday's episode for more. So those vision plans, I mean, those updates slowly.

They're not annual plans. They can remain unchanged for years or they can be changed multiple times in a year. But my quarterly semester plans are game plans for what I want to do for the next few months to make progress on that vision. Yes, these things change. Quarterly plans clearly change if like something new drops on your lap. Oh, here's a cool opportunity. That's going to change your quarterly plan.

or something's not working out. Like this is just not coming together. I don't really have time to do this. I'm taking launching a podcast off my quarterly plan. I'm one month into the semester and realize this was hubris. Let's take it off. I think that's fine. Edit it.

These bigger picture plans, visions, what you're calling annual plans, you know, they should change less frequently, but you should be reflecting on this stuff. And when they need the change, let them change. I mean, don't do it every day. Don't let every movie you see that gives you a burst of inspiration and change your vision for the next few years for your working life. But, you know, if something festers, this is usually how I do it.

If a particular change, just I can't shake it for a couple of weeks, and maybe I'll go in and edit that. And sometimes very traumatic things happen, like pandemics. That changed quite a bit about my vision, right, when I had to adjust things, right? So, Son Diego, change things as you need to, as makes sense. Don't do it willy-nilly. Don't do it on a moment's notice. Give yourself a cool-down period before you allow an inspiration to make an actual

change, but I think it's fine. The one specific strategy I'll note is that I've often, for example, used a moleskin that keep with me to take non-professional notes, like notes about my life and what I want to do and what I think about my life. And I typically review those monthly. That's actually a pretty good time

to review bigger picture like annual plans or visions. So that's not a bad habit to suggest. If you keep a notebook for those ideas, you can let things sit. And once a month, you see what's stuck around. and what you've lost interest in.

And so you might want to have a monthly notebook review as a way to allow yourself to brainstorm on some of these changes. But again, some things are obvious. You need to get rid of a project, new thing drops in your lap. Make changes if you need to. I'm not going to be mad at you. Let's take a moment to talk about ExpressVPN. What actually happens when you're on your laptop

and you connect to that Wi-Fi access point? You know, you're at the library and you connect to the access point. And you start surfing the web, your computer is sending packets. I'm sending packets over that wireless connection. And the packets say, here's who I am. And this is the website. I'm sending information to. Anyone can see that.

Anyone with a basic packet sniffer can say like, ah, this is who, what websites you're visiting. You're visiting Calnewport.com. Are you crazy? I think we need to fire this person. You know who else sees all that information? Your internet service provider. Comcast, Verizon, whoever you get your internet through,

They see, because they're routing them for you, all these packets of where you're going, what websites you're visiting. And you know what? In the U.S., they can legally sell that information to add companies and tech giants. This is what this person is up to. They're visiting calnewport.com quite a bit. So, you know, let's not try to sell them books that are too smart. This person is clearly an idiot.

A VPN solves this problem. With a VPN, here's how it works. You say, oh, here's who I'm talking to people who are sniffing. Here's who I'm talking to Verizon or Comcast. I'm talking to the ExpressVPN servers. And then you send to the ExpressVPN servers in an encrypted packet who you really want to talk to. They opened that encrypted packet and they talk to that server. They talk to Calnewport.com on your behalf and then encrypt the answer and send it back to you.

So now everyone who's listening into your conversation, they say, ah, they're just talking to their VPN. We have no idea who that VPN is then going to talk to on their behalf. Your service provider doesn't know. The people who are sniffing your packets don't know. Your CalNewport.com Affinity Secret is safe. VPNs are critical. If you don't want people to know what you're up to, and ExpressVPN, I think, is the best in the business.

They have the most servers. The servers are the connections are the fastest, and the software is the most seamless. When you're running ExpressVPN, you're just using your computer as normal. You don't even notice that this nice indirection is actually happening. Very easy to use. So if you want to secure your online activity today,

go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep to get an extra three months free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-S-V-N.com slash deep. ExpressVPN.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our good friends at Optimize. And I'm not using that phrase euphemistically. Optimize is founded by my actual longtime and good friend, Brian Johnson. Optimizes a subscription network that basically focuses on the goal of helping you live a deep.

deeper life. Brian uses the terminology heroic life, but we're 100% in alignment on what we're thinking about here. So when you sign up for Optimize, you get a few things. One, you get access to the archives of Brian's philosopher notes. These are detailed summaries of some of the most wisdom-filled nonfiction books ever written. Every single philosopher note is handwritten by Brian. There's over 600 of them. They're the absolute best book summaries out there. You will also get a plus one every day in your inbox. This is a short video featuring Brian giving you one piece of wisdom from one of these books. If you like that wisdom, you can click on the link and grab the full philosopher notes to learn more. Incredible wisdom that comes right in there. You also get

access to their 101 courses. These are over 50 courses taught by experts on some of the big ideas that are summarized at Optimize. I did one of these courses, Digital Minimalism 101. So I can tell you from personal experience that they are great. So if you're feeling run down by this pandemic, you want to live deeper, you want to live more heroically. Optimize is going to be a giant step in that direction. Now go to optimize.combe.combe slash deep and use the coupon code deep when you check out to get both 14 days free and 10% off. That's Optimize spelled O P-T-I-M-I-Z-E, Optimize.comize. dot me slash deep and use that coupon code deep to kickstart a shift towards a deeper life today. Josh asks, how would you apply the 4DX principles from DeepWork to your current model of life buckets?

I was rereading DeepWork recently and the section about 4DX really spoke to me. It felt like something clicked between those principles and your discussions over the past eight months of the life buckets and even the Deep Reset. I've been applying 4DX to my health and fitness buckets for the past few weeks, and I think it's really helped my consistency. Well, for those who don't know, 4DX, that's short for the four disciplines of execution. This is a framework that was invented by the Stephen Covey company. They have a great book, and I believe the book is called 4DX, and I really recommend it. I really recommend it. Now, 4DX is designed, it's a framework designed to have.

help teams and companies turn around to be more effective on the things that matter to them. And the Covey company, they wrote this book, but they have consultants to come in and work with companies and implement the 40X framework. And it's, you know, hey, we're trying to get our sales up or something or turn around this unit. And from what I understand, it's really effective. In deep work, there's a chapter where I said, hey, when thinking about your own life, if you're an individual in business, you might want to start applying some ideas to business

business thinkers apply to teams and companies. You can apply some of these ideas to your own life. In other words, the big point I was trying to make is for some things you want to treat yourself like an organization that you're trying to, in a structured way, optimize. For example, look at this 4DX principles, which are really popular and help teams turn around. You could imagine applying, like,

these could inspire changes you did to your own life, and then I summarize those principles. So it's not that I'm saying like 4DX is critical to deep work, but this general idea that, like, Like, think of yourself as a business. If you hired a team of consultants to help turn around your business, what would they, what systems would they put in place? Have that same sort of optimization focus, systematic focus on your life as an individual in the world of business. That being said, some of the details of 40X, I think can directly apply to the deep work buckets.

Let's go through them real quick. We'll see what Josh is talking about. So the first idea, and I'm opening my coffee of deep work here, you turn your hyminal, hymnals. to page 136, if you have the U.S. edition, you'll get here. The first discipline was focus on wildly important. Focus on the wildly important. Okay, in the context of business, that means something very specific. But when it comes to one of your deep life buckets,

and that means what's the big thing I'm trying to accomplish or achieve or sustain in this bucket? So I have like a really clear vision of something that is compelling and clear. Discipline two act on the lead measures. It's a really cool idea from 4DX, which says, don't just act on the, what they call the lag measures, the things that you ultimately want to improve. Track the things that capture the actions you're doing right now that will cause that to move. So don't just track what are our sales numbers this week. You should track how many sales calls are we making.

The sales we made is a lag measure. You can't directly influence that. Like, oh, I'm going to go raise that. The number of calls we made as a lead indicator. It's something you can change directly in control. You can make more calls. I think this comes up and it's congruent to the metric tracking I talk about, especially for your deep life buckets.

So, you know, the metrics you track should probably be these lead indicators. Things you can control and doing more of will help move the lag indicator, the ultimate thing you want to improve. You want to be 10 pounds lighter. The lag measure is your weight. The lead measure might be, you know, number of steps you took, the degree to which you stuck to an eating plant, et cetera. So I think that's smart. So don't just keep metrics in your deep life buckets.

The metrics, to the extent possible, should include lead measures, the things you can control that influence the things you care about. Discipline three, keep a compelling scoreboard. Yeah. So if you're tracking these measures, have them in a place you can see and it's really clear and you have to face when you don't do them. and celebrate when you do. I'm a big believer of that. This is why my time block planner has a clear space for metric tracking. You see it every day.

Here's exactly how I'm doing on those metrics. And then discipline four is create a cadence of accountability. Not a bad idea. Not a bad idea to have someone in your life who you're accountable to. Here's what I'm trying to do. Here is how I'm doing it. Here's what I'm tracking, both lead and lag. And I'm going to tell you about it every week.

You can do this online with someone you know. You can do this with a coach. You know, like one of our sponsors, for example, is my body tutor. You're trying to lose weight or get in better shape. It's actually a virtual coach, a coach you talk to every single day and tell them how you're doing. So, accountability. You could do this with your partner. You could do this with your spouse, your boyfriend, your girlfriend.

So I think that's a good idea too. So, yeah, Josh, I think the ideas from 4DX could work really well for trying to make progress in your deep life buckets. And again, more generally, be systematic when you're trying to improve aspects of your life. be systematic. If you were a company in this aspect corresponded to your profitability and then the consulting firm came in, like what would be the big changes they would make? Think about making changes in your life with that mindset, that mindset in mind, as it were.

All right. I think we have time for one last question. This one comes from Poseidon who asks, how does one balance deep work with a partner who is equally as ambitious given the demands of home life, children, etc. It seems having both individuals in a relationship equally ambitious would create tension on who gives when push comes to shove. So Poseidon, for now I'm going to punt on the actual question

you're asking here because I want to focus first on a vocabulary issue that is important, I think, for our audience to get straight. you are using the term deep work here incorrectly. When you say, you know, how do I balance deep work with a partner who's equally ambitious? You don't mean deep work. You mean how do I balance a job that has high time demands with a partner who also has a job with high time demands? And that's a hard problem. We'll put that aside for now.

But I want to come back to that confusion, this idea that deep work has something to do with really big time demands. The deep work means you have to be locked away for 15 hours a day. More importantly, that deep work somehow means that you are doing an unusual amount of work that's going to require an unusual amount of sacrifice by someone else. Deep work has nothing to do with that. A deep work is focus on something hard without distraction. Do one thing at a time instead of trying to interleave things. You get more out of your brain.

It has nothing to do with hours of work. In fact, there's only so many hours of deep work you can actually do in a day. This is why if you look at John Grisham he writes for three three and a half hours every morning and then he's done I think he like coaches his kids

little league teams then he built a bunch of little league fields and then he named himself the commissioner of his town's Little League league because he only had three or four hours of work to do a day if all he's doing is writing books

and what I'm trying to say here is that deep work has nothing to do at time you can embrace an idea like slow productivity that I talked about at the opening of this episode where over time you keep coming back to something hard and meaningful and over time, really cool stuff gets produced

and this has nothing to do with you being busy. This has nothing to do with you doing really long hours. This has nothing to do with any sort of unusual workload. And I don't want to mix up those two terms. And why do I not want to mix up those two terms? Because when they're mixed, it generates a misguided, knee-jerk, negative reaction to the concept of deep work.

And that might prevent more people from actually embracing this more satisfying style of approaching their professional efforts. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, I often encounter this reaction to the concept of deep work that I summarize as the, but who is watching the kids' reaction? Right. So something about deep work gets mentioned, and it's like, well, who watches the kids when you're doing deep work?

Now, this retort only makes sense if your conception of deep work has something to do with like an unusual workload. like an amount of work that's different than a normal job, right? Because let's say I'm introducing you to, you know, a friend of mine, I say, oh, this is, you know, this is John and he's an insurance underwriter at Prudential and, you know, he works down there in downtown Hartford. It would be weird if your reaction was like, well, who watches your kids when you're at your job in Hartford, John? You'd be like, you know, daycare or something. I don't know, what do you mean? Like, I work in Hartford on insurance underwriting and no, my kids don't come to the office. office with me and they're in school and then they go to an aftercare and we pick them up afterwards.

It would be weird, right? You know, or when I tell people I'm a professor, no one says, well, who's watching your kids when you're teaching those classes? It's like that. When you're at your job, you're some sort of child care setup. But for some reason when deep work gets brought up, that's a common reaction. Well, who's watching the kids when you're doing this deep work? The implication, again, is like, this must mean something where you are working a very unusual amount of time. So let's say like your partners use the implication is having to do an unusual amount of child care. Maybe they have to put their career on hold or something to the balance out your ability to do deep work because it requires all these hours. And what I'm trying to say is it has

nothing to do with hours. And once we recognize that, you know, focusing without distraction on something meaningful over time as opposed to being more frenetic and context shifting, I mean, honestly, it's probably going to reduce the number of hours you work. And nothing about it has anything to do with an unusual amount of work or being in a work circumstance where someone else is going and have to have an unusual amount of other responsibilities. It's not really, it's just orthogonal to all those issues. So I just want to make that clarification because let's just clear away obstacles to the notion of focused effort. Let's just clear away unnecessary obstacles because, again, we're trying to encourage people to find a benefit of getting sequential and slowing down and putting more time on the deeper things and less time on the shallow.

And I don't want unnecessary obstacles. All right, rant aside, let's get the Poseidon's question. Poseidon, there's no answer there. jobs that require a lot of time kind of suck if you have kids and if you both have one of those then it sucks and even if just one of you has it that doesn't solve the problem

because eight out of ten people I know in that situation it's terrible for the family if one person is always gone on a really long hour job or they have to work late every day and they have to travel all the time at the moment's notice it's not good

we don't see you you don't feel like you're part of the family the family doesn't feel like you're part of the family it's usually not good. I mean, sometimes it works and, you know, maybe you have someone at home who does their own thing and you do your own thing, but it's usually, you know, it's hard. Jobs to require a huge amount of hours are stressful.

It puts strain on the family and it often is in conflict with our human wiring. So I don't have a great answer for you. I'm not a big fan of jobs to require a huge hours. It's why I'm a professor. It's why I'm a writer. That's why I can go away in July with my family for three weeks and not do any work because, you know, I'm a professor in summertime. and in between books

and because I really don't like the stresses of having really huge rigid time requirements on my work. So I don't know what answer you were hoping to find their

beside and other than me saying think very carefully is this high hour demand job what I really want to build my life around and you probably

want to put in place here some lifestyle centric career planning where you and your partner figure out a vision of a lifestyle, what's your day like, what's your week like, who's around you, what's the rhythms, how do you feel, where do you live, what type of activities are you doing, what role does work play in your life?

Nail down this vision and then say given what we know how to do, our skills or education, our opportunities, how do we then reverse engineer this and build a professional life that supports it? And probably you can come up with an answer that does not involve 20 hours of work a night and having to go to Singapore for, you know, six weeks on a moment's notice, right? So you might want to consider some lifestyle-centric career planning because most of people who go through that do not end up with the really heavy hour job being the thing that they really need to do to get the lifestyle they want. All right. So I had two things to say there. Just quick summary. Number one, don't mix deep work up with deeply time-consuming jobs.

These are two separate things. Actually, people who work deeply often work less. It's better for family life. And two, really high-demand jobs are rough. And there's not really a ton of circumstances where that's probably the right idea, like the thing that really is going to build you the best possible life. All right, that's probably enough for this week's episode. Thanks for everyone who submitted their questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.