Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 122: LISTENER CALLS: Figuring Out Your Values

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast. - Naturally disorganized people. [3:23] - Coping with highly reactionary schedules. [11:07] - Digital versus analog weekly plans. [16:32] - Summer reading (plus: my idea for a novel). [21:29]  - Prioritizing friendly connections. [32:25] - Figuring out your values. [36:59]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.

This episode is sponsored in part by Blinkist. You've heard me say before ideas are power in our current culture and the best place to master new ideas is in books. How do you figure out which books to read? Blinkist. When you subscribe to the Blinkist app, you get access to short explainers in text or audio that take just 15 minutes to consume of thousands of top nonfiction. titles. You want to know what's going on in Homo Deus? 15 minute explainers? Oh, I got the big idea. What's going on with cryptocurrency? Let me get the 15 minute explainer of blockchain revolution, read it or listen to it right in my app. Boom, I've got the idea. And what I recommend is that you

use these explainers to very quickly understand what's going on, I should say, in some of these important top nonfiction books. And then you can figure out, oh, is this something I want to read in more depth or not? In some cases, the 15 minute summaries, all you need. So you can talk and intelligently about that topic. In another case, you say, great, now I know this is a book I want to read, and then you can buy it. So it's a great way to filter the books. You don't need to read from the books that you should. Blinkist really is a must have if you want to navigate this world of rapidly changing complex ideas. So here's the good news. Right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial

and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist, spelled B, I N-K-I-S-T-Blincus.com slash deep to get 25% off any seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a Deep Questions, listener calls, mini-episode. As always, go to calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions on how you can submit your own listener calls for these many episodes. It's easy to do. You do it straight. from your browser. Quick poll before we get started.

I'm toying with the idea of homogenizing the two episodes each week. In this case, there wouldn't be a normal episode where I only read questions and then a quote unquote mini episode where I only do listener calls. I'm thinking about having both episodes be roughly the same length and be a mix. Some questions are written. Some questions are voice. Sometimes guests will show up into DeepWork HQ. they'll join me for one of the two episodes to help me answer questions or do a deep dive.

And that's something I'm thinking about. Anyways, I don't know if that's a good idea or bad idea. If you have thoughts, feel free to send those along to Interesting at Calnewport.com. Speaking of interesting, we've got an interesting block of listener calls to handle in today's mini episode. Some of these are deep life-e. Some of these are deep worky. There's a couple time block planners in here. Questions, as always.

but there's also some questions about figuring out your values and deciding who your real friends are. So we got a cool mix here, so let's get right into it. We'll start with a question about being naturally disorganized. Hey, Cal, it's Camille here from Paris, France. I'm 24, and I'm co-founder and CEO at Freed.app. My question is a rather personal one for you, Cal. In terms of organization, are you a natural? or are you rather a clutter desk Einstein type of person?

I'm asking you because I would say I'm naturally a chaotic person, but I'm also ambitious. So I've put huge efforts since my higher education to become more organized through systematic discipline. It allowed me to be quite successful academically and business-wise, but I realized that I can't afford to relax in terms of organization because as soon as I do, I immediately fall back. to my natural chaotic nature.

Therefore, I need to always be on my guard, like my worst enemy is myself, and it's tiring. So are you Cal in the same situation? Does it ever become easier to be organized? Is it even possible for a naturally chaotic person to grow second skin? Well, this is a good question because it does allow us to get at this issue of some people being more naturally organized than others. this is definitely a real effect.

I think there are both positive and negative forces when it comes to a natural proclivity towards organization. On the positive side, some people are just wired to be upset by disorder. Seeing piles of stuff in their house, seeing clutter makes them uneasy, and they literally feel better when things are more organized. If that is your personality type, you're going to have a much easier time organizing your work because what you're doing here is being pushed towards organization to avoid the bad feeling you have when things are disorganized. To answer your original question, this is probably where I fall.

I think the reason why I have been attracted to discourses surrounding organizational productivity is because I don't like clutter. I'm just wired in a way that it makes me uncomfortable. There are also, as I mentioned, negative forces surrounding natural organization. If you have, for example, ADHD, this has a multi-varied manifestations depending on exactly what type of ADHD you have and where you are in these various relevant behavioral spectrums. But one of the big manifestations of ADHD is that it pushes you away from organization. It is very difficult for you to get things put together in an organized way. You lose focus on that. Your mind wanders to other places.

You don't really have that drive towards organization. So there's negative forces that sometimes pull people away from organization, which all translates to. There's some sort of scale of natural organizationalness and people fall in different places on that scale for various reasons. All right. So can you avoid then? Let's say you're more naturally disorganized. You're more in the disorganized side of that scale. Can you avoid needing to organize your work?

Should you instead say, look, that's just not my personality type. I just rock and roll. The answer there I think is no. Work needs to be organized. And what I mean by organized is stuff you have to do is off your mind and in a trusted system. You're intentional about how you spend your time. Here's what's happening today. Here's the time I have available.

Here's what needs to get done. Here's what I'm going to do in that time. I'm going to try to build the best day out of what's available to me. And your work needs to be essentialized. This is good. This is good. I don't have time for that. this is getting me off target. Let me take this off my plate. So really thinking about what's on your

what's on your plate. What do you committed to? What's a reasonable amount of things to commit to? How do you choose what things you should commit to? Those three things together, let's say sum up to organization. You need to do that. And what I mean by you need to do that is that if you do those three things, you will always be much more effective at your work than if you don't. There is not a scenario in which a naturally disorganized person somehow ends up ahead. not doing those type of organizational activities. Now, for a disorganized person, naturally disorganized person, those organizational activities will come harder. They will be harder. They'll require more effort. They will require more strain than a naturally organized person.

But again, doing the strain to organize, even though you had to pay the price to organize, you'll still end up much better, at least in terms of your ability to function sustainably and effectively as a professional. So what should you do then? Well, here's what I want you to keep in mind. Different types of work. Different types of workloads are going to induce different amounts of strain when it comes time to do this organization. So if I was a naturally disorganized person, I would not give up on being organized. Because, again, you don't do those efforts for organization.

You're going to be in a bad place. A fraction of your possible productivity. You're going to be stressed. You're going to have things in your mind. It's not great. but there's certain types of work and workloads in which it's going to be much easier for a naturally disorganized person to accomplish those tasks than other types of workloads. And honestly, what I would recommend to the degree that it's able, that you're able,

that you have this autonomy would be shifting my work towards things that are more easily organized. I would still organize it, but look for more easily organizable work. And on the flip side, if I'm someone who's very naturally organized, well, that opens up interesting niches for you that might not. be available to others. Highly administrative, complex leadership roles that you can master because you're naturally organized and so you can handle the strain of organizing much more demanding complicated workloads. So to be more concrete here, if I was less naturally organized, if I was more naturally disorganized, I would try to get my work to have less things on my plate.

So maybe a small number of larger projects that I can really jam on and not have to very quickly switch back and forth between lots of things. I would try to offload. or automate as much shallow work or logistics as possible. Because again, if to organize a work life in which there's a ton of different logistics and decisions that have to be made and quick meetings that have to jump through and processes to be coordinated, that requires a ton of organization to get that right. That's hard to do if you're naturally disorganized. So I try to move away from that.

If I'm in your situation where you're a founder and CEO of a startup, I would have a right-hand person, some sort of assistant or chief of staff that's doing a lot of that stuff for me, worth the money in that. situation. So you can focus more on the bigger picture things that are important. So just to step back, basically what I'm saying here is you can avoid needing to get things off your mind, be intentional about your time, and essentialize your workloads. If you don't do that, you will be worse, you will end up more stressed, you will not end up better off. But different types of work are easier to tackle from that perspective than others. And so we should keep in mind our natural proclivity.

So, yes, it will get easier for you to be organized once you get used to these habits and they become routine, but we should just be realistic. Don't try to give yourself a job in which you are juggling 17 very quickly evolving real-time crises. That's always going to be much harder for you than a job that is much more granular, or the large granularity. So fit the work to your personality to the degree possible. And then once you've done that, one way or the other, it's better to be a lot. to have your arms around it, then to just roll through it chaotically. All right, speaking about chaos, let's do a question here about highly reactionary schedules. Hi, Cal. I'm a litigator and I'm an associate. I'm sold on the idea of deep work and the concept

of time blocking, but I'm struggling with implementation because there are days that are unavoidably reactionary. There are fires to put out from several directions, including partners, opposing parties, and clients. I'm sure this phenomenon is not limited to law. In those instances, I've tried to make new time block plans, but wind up making so many as things change that it seems like an overwhelming exercise and futility. These days are not as isolated as I would like, and I would estimate two to three days a week this happens. I've been making serious attempts at time blocking for a few months off and on, if I'm honest, and it just doesn't seem to be getting easier. Well, I like this question because it allows me to talk about the chaos day method.

So there's a lot of positions that have a similar issue to the one you describe as a litigator. CEOs, especially CEOs of startups, come to mind as another common example. Their days often just get, I don't want to say hijacked. They just get redirected because there's a lot of things they have to react to. You can't predict what they are. You don't know that your product server is going to go down today at noon, but something like that does happen often. So it's common in a lot of positions to have days that get completely redirected to something

unpredictable that eats up most of the rest of the time. And it's hard to even predict how that unpredictable thing is going to unfold through the day. That's fine. That's an attribute of your job. We can deal with it using the chaos days method. So here's the idea. First of all, if you expect chaos days to happen often, typically you want to focus on the very beginning of your day and be incredibly careful about your time blocking for the beginning of the day.

What are the things I know need to get done? Because things typically come apart a little bit later in the day. It takes time for crises to actually get their momentum going. So you're very careful with your very early time blocking to make sure that, you know, this memo has to get sent back. This thing has to get filed. I at least have to touch base on this client. Let's make sure that all gets done early. Then if your day gets knocked off the rails and you have to abandon your time block plan for the rest of the day. And you know, look, this day is probably not going to come back on the rails because there's a client emergency or a senior partner just came in and said, we're really having an issue with whatever. And you know, like, this is going to be the

rest of my day. You don't attempt to build a detailed time block for the rest of your day. You don't say, okay, let me fix my schedule to better reflect what's going to happen because if it's a chaos that you can't predict it. But what you do is you time block to critical things, right? You say, okay, I know I'm going to lose the rest of this day, but these three things still have to happen today, even among the chaos. This client still needs a call for me. This brief still has to be submitted. Let me put that on my time block for the rest of the day. And I'm going to put a star in the box. It's what people do who follow the chaos day method. You put a star in that box. And this has to happen when I get there. So when I see I'm getting closer and closer to that box, no matter what's going on. Everyone, I know we're dealing with this crisis, but at two, I got to drop off the radar for an hour because I got to get to get to.

this brief end, and you leave the rest of the schedule for that day empty. And doesn't mean you're not working. It means you just know you're going to be reactive, going back and forth, rock and rolling, trying to deal with the chaos that's going on. And even if you have some downtime in there, your brain's going to be all frazzled. You don't really want to be trying to quickly shift to other blocks. Anyway, so you just rock and roll with the chaos, except for when you get to those starred critical blocks, you say you stop everything and get those done. It gives you a way of still making sure that you don't fall behind on things that have to

happen while also realistically recognizing that once you're in a chaos day, you can no longer give every minute a job in some sort of predictable or accurate manner. The final piece of the chaos day method is you need a really good shutdown routine. You got to expect your shutdown routine to take a little longer because all this chaos has happened. It has generated probably a lot of new obligations, follow-ups, new work that has to happen. It is also probably knocked off your plate, things that you had originally. planned to get done. So expect that your shutdown routine is going to be a little bit longer on those chaos days

because you're going to have to update your weekly plan. And try to make up for and find time for the things that lost. You also have to update those task systems to make sure all these new low-hanging fruit make their way onto your taskboards, make their way into your weekly plan. Maybe they need to show up on your calendar, right? You want to make sure that at the end of the chaos day, you tamped down the chaos so when you shut down, you can shut down. Everything has been reintegrated into your systems.

So you might have felt chaotic during the day, but your brain is not chaotic during the night. And this works well. Don't think of this as a failure of the plan. Think about this as a very smart adaptation of time blocking for a particular type of job that often but not always falls into unpredictable chaos. The key stuff gets done. The new stuff and the stuff gets handled. You're able to react appropriately. You're still able to shut down.

Do these three things as a litigator. it's going to give you a, I think it's going to give you a big competitive advantage, not just in your ability to perform, but in your ability to reduce that stress, which over time will bring down your ability to perform. All right. Speaking of planning, let's do a question now about weekly planning. Hey, Calh, Sean here. Quick question about your time block planner.

The week ahead page in my weekly planning. Every week, I write out by hand my top five projects and each day. key themes for that day. But I do it by hand and wondering if you do it digitally or whether you see benefit in actually writing it out by hand. I kind of think there's benefit by writing it out by hand, but would love your perspective on that. Well, Sean, this is really a matter of taste.

A lot of people do like handwriting their weekly plan. That's why I put weekly plan pages for every week in my time block planner. If you're, let's say, commuting, for example, your commuting, on the subway. The ability to just have this analog thing you can open up and look at and what's my weekly plan and what do I have to think about for today without having to load up a computer without having to look at your phone. That's really nice. Some people like to do their planning just separate from their computer. So there's a difference between being in that world of reaction and inputs and being in the world of thinking and intention and planning. There's just a nice,

There's just a nice break there. And as you hint to that, I think some people like handwriting something as a way of making it more serious or something that they're more likely to remember. So I think all those attributes are good. Other people like the digital version because they maybe change their plan a lot. And so it's difficult for them to keep updating a handwritten plan. So they're going to type it. Some people also have very voluminous weekly plans, you know, a lot of freeform pros and list. and they just want to do this in text so they can type it real quick.

So it's really up the taste, and your taste is probably dictated by the nature of your weekly plans. So however you want to do, it's fine by me. Well, let's just take this moment that just quickly remind people the type of things that can go into your weekly plan. So one probably foremost is that people like to put into their weekly plan the big rocks they want to accomplish that week. Because when you form your weekly plan, you're looking at your strategic plan, whether we call, this, your quarterly plan or your semester plan or your strategic plans, all the same thing. What am I doing in the months ahead to make progress on my vision for my professional life? And now you want to maybe integrate some of that important but non-urgent work into your schedule

for the week. The weekly plan is the time to do it. It's also the time to look at the deadlines and appointments on your calendar and realize, aha, this Rockland memo is due on Friday. So I've got to really put a lot of work into the Rockland memo this week. Bonus points to those who can identify identify the Rockland memo reference appropriately. And so you figure out the big things, typically with your weekly plan. What are the big rocks that you need to get done? You list those. I mean, often when I do my weekly plan, I will put those on my calendar, too.

If it's really important, I make progress on it, then let me find a time I'm going to do that and block it out on my calendar. Another thing people do with their weekly plans is they list out key tasks they want to get done. Not necessarily every small task they want to do, but if there's some task on their various task boards or task list, that really should get done this week. I don't have a list of these. So you're kind of calling them out. So you can see this list. If you've handwritten your weekly plan,

you can just see things get crossed out as the week goes on. And that's important because we have a lot of tasks on our plate if we're the typical knowledge worker. So highlighting some in particular to focus on is helpful. The third thing that people put often in their weekly plans are productivity heuristics, custom fit to that week. So, for example, you know you have to finish a book chapter that week and you have a kind of busy week. You might have a heuristic that you put right there in your weekly plan that says first hour every morning right. You know, that's how we're going to get there.

Or if you have a lot of small tasks, an unusual amount of small tasks with some urgency happening that week. Maybe you just move to offices for your startup. There's a lot of small things. You know, we've got to reconnect this service. We've got to order a new table. You just know there's going to be a lot of small tasks. You might put a productivity heuristic in your weekly plan that says 30 minutes at lunch every single day, stomp, stop, stop, stop, small office-related tasks.

Because if I do that five days this week, I'll get on top of this. And I don't want to think too hard about how to do it. Let me just make a simple heuristic. Those are the three main types of things I see in weekly plans. Different people do different combinations. Some people have different things they do in it. But it's just a good reminder of what happens with your weekly plan. You look at the plan for the quarter of the semester.

you create your weekly plan and then every day when you time block plan you look to that weekly plan and now we've connected the very high, the abstract, the vision to the very low, here's what I'm doing this hour and the weekly plan is to glue between those two things. So regardless of what technology you use to record

your weekly plan, do not omit actually building that plan every week. All right, let's shift gears here a little bit and do a quick question about summer reading. Hey, Cal, it's Kevin. We're coming up on summer fiction beach reading season, and I'm curious if you have any fiction recommendations

or thoughts in general about how to pick fiction books to read when you're maxed out on nonfiction. Well, I love summer reading. I was raised in particular on genre fiction. I started reading genre fiction at a pretty young age. My vague memory is I started reading Crichton and Grisham and Robin Cook, maybe around the third grade. And so I just grew up. with genre fiction and I love reading it. I'll read it year round but I read a lot in the summer. And I know you submitted this question at the beginning of the summer. Now we're getting closer to the end of the summer, but we can still talk about this. I like it for the reasons you're talking about. A, it doesn't challenge that part of your brain that's needed for reading hard

nonfiction. The part of your brain that has to try to analyze the information and fit it to preexisting structures and schemas. I mean, obviously I love doing that, but it's nice to get a break from that. I also like with lighter genre-style fiction, it doesn't engage that part of your brain that you get in more literary fiction, where you have a lot of empathetic connection with the characters and the author has done a very masterful job of simulating emotions in you. And this is all very powerful. It's what makes really good fiction very powerful, but it could be kind of exhausting. You're reading Clive Custler. You're neither carefully carefully analyzing sophisticated

non-fiction ideas, nor is your brain highly engaged in empathetic connection to real human moments. It's actually kind of a nice relief. So what have I been reading this summer from a beach fiction perspective? I read Andy Weir's new book

The Project Hail Mary. I like that style, this hard sci-fi style where he gets hardcore into the math, says, yeah, forget characters. Let's just like do all plot and let's make the plot be really focused on just the science and the math. I think it's really innovative and I really enjoyed it. This is the guy who wrote The Martian in case you're wondering. I went back and read Michael Crichton's book, The Terminal Man. I'm a bit of a Crichton fanboy. So the Terminal Man was one of the first

books he wrote under his own name. I believe it was Adronima Strain, then Terminal Man. And I really enjoyed it. It's very tight. Short book. It takes place in two days, a very small number of settings, right? He did not yet have that confidence to do a broad book that's going to take place over a giant area like Jurassic Park with many characters and many different plot lines. It's very focused, but it really moves. And I enjoyed it. I thought that was fun. So now in the spirit of going back to early classics, I've jumped ahead to the early 90s and I'm at the moment rereading John Grisham's the client. Again, it's great. I think this was his fourth book, maybe his fifth, and it really just roles and a great example of genre fiction writing.

I'm also rereading Michael Conley's very first Bosch book, The Black Echo. And Connolly's great. He's great at detective writing. So that's been good as well. I don't know. I've read a few others of these books recently. But yeah, I love this type of genre summer fiction reading. So maybe this is a good chance to talk about the idea I have for a novel.

So if I ever write a novel, and this is the time for my literary agent and my publishers to close their ears because I think their heads would melt. They're like, don't think about writing a novel for God's sake. You have so much of their stuff to do. There's not a serious thing I'm saying. But if I was, let's say you have to write a novel, Cal, you're not allowed to write nonfiction. Here's the idea I had over the summer for a novel. Taking the Andy Weir style of science-based hard nonfiction, where really the plot is focused on, getting the science or the mathematics right.

And there's something really interesting in that, right? Taking that approach and applying it to the topic of artificial intelligence. In particular, a book that's very tightly written, like early Crichton, I'm thinking Adronoma Strain, I'm thinking terminal men, very tightly written, small number of days, small number of people, focusing on the very first time that an artificial intelligence system tips past some sort of threshold where there's some sort of danger

to humans or humanity and getting the math, the computer science, right. This is what it would actually be like. This is six years in the future and this is the thing that tips it over. Let's get really careful about it. It was this breakthrough through chips

on this type of deep learning neural network and here's the people involved and here's how it would actually happen. So whereas Andy Weir really goes in on the physics and let's get the physics right. What would happen if you were trying to survive on Mars, I say get the computer science right. Like really, what would happen?

And instead of being this abstract thing, if it's how and the computer comes alive and it's shooting lasers at people, like, where would it be? It would be, you know, is it at some startup and they're at some data center and they were able to, what, quadruple, quadruple the number of layers in a deep learning net or they got some sort of reinforcement system in place that went awry? I don't know. I think that'd be a really good way to do techno-criticism, sort of set up the concerns about where might AI go wrong in this type of existential threat sort of way and get the computer

science right about it? And it would be a really interesting probably plot. So that's my idea. Okay. If you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, you should let me know it interesting at calnewport.com. Actually, I really am interested in talking to someone about just on background. What would that look like? Like, what's a good guess of a couple types of breakthroughs or developments or direction changes in AI research that might lead to the very first threshold event in which there's some actual danger to humans from AI. I'd love to hear anyone who had any thoughts or occasions on that. And then you can convince me to write it or say, dear God, don't write it.

You can send me notes at interesting at calnewport.com. Again, to underscore for people on my publishing team, I'm not going to go write a novel. I'm still writing nonfiction books, but I do, when I'm in the mode of summer reading, I do like to brainstorm. I want to take a moment to talk about another one of our sponsors, 4Sigmatic, a wellness company that is known for its delicious mushroom coffee. 4Sigmatic's mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin, Arabica coffee with Lions Main Mushroom for Productivity and Shaga Mushroom for Immune Support.

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You don't like it. Boom, refund. All right, so to find out more and to order your sample pack, go to, drink element.com. That's drink l minti.com. All right, as we head here towards the end of the episode, let's try to fit in two quick questions that are more on the deep life side of the work-life spectrum.

Hi, Cal. This is Sylvia from Burbank, California. How do you mindfully and harmoniously manage your friends and relatives' connections? I'm asking this outside of any recurrent gatherings you might have. How do you prioritize? Well, I think I know who my real friends are, especially after cutting down on social media and its fake hierarchy, sometimes it's easy to get distracted or even forgetful,

like does friend X come before a friend Y, etc. Well, Sylvia, what I like to do is maintain a tournament-style bracket of my friends. So I know what their seat is at any one point. where people fall out in their ranking at the moment, and then I keep them informed. I say, Sylvia, I'm sorry, but you just fell from a 10 seed to a 16th seed, so I'm going to cut down my interaction with you by 45%. Now, I'm, of course, joking here. Here's my thing.

One of the big arguments from my book, Digital Minimalism, is this notion that connection is different than conversation. So connection is just any type of informative. interaction. It could just be text messages. It could be WhatsApp chatting. It could be a comment on a social media post or an email. Conversation, on the other hand, has two attributes to it. One is an analog nature. So you're actually able to hear the person's voice. You're going back and forth in real time and hearing voices and all those nuances. And if you're in person, you're also seeing body language, facial expressions, et cetera. So it's a much richer stream of information. It's not just a

linguistic content of what's being said, but how it's being said and how the person is, how the person actually looks as they're saying it. The other aspect of conversation is there's typically a factor of non-trivial sacrifice of time and attention. You know, it's very easy to send a text message, but actually to go spend some time with someone else and we go on an outing together and interact with each other, there's much more time and attention and energy is being invested into it. The argument is that conversation is what you need to,

a relationship. It is what your brain actually thinks of when it thinks of social interaction is what it actually classifies as social interaction. If you are having regular conversation with someone, your brain will see that as someone that you are strongly connected to. And if you're not, you won't. That brings us back to connection. Connection's not bad, but it doesn't substitute for conversation. It's not bad the text message with someone. But if all you were doing is text messaging with someone, your brain does not see that as a very strong relationship. That's not really a relationship because there's no conversation there. It's an impoverished form.

Impoverished form of a relationship. Now, it doesn't mean connecting is not useful. In fact, connecting is very useful, especially, and this is a key point from that chapter in digital minimalism for logistics. Hey, are you around tonight? Well, what about you want to come over later? Do you want to go grab a drink somewhere? Like, it's very convenient or you're at the wrong restaurant.

No, I'm across the street. I mean, that's great. It's really nice that we have text messaging for that, right? I mean, it's also nice for checking in with people. Like, hey, how are things going? What do you think about this? You're worried about this late in COVID thing. What are you doing for camp this week?

It's very great for getting information back and forth and checking in, but it's not the same as conversation. So once you recognize that, you rebuild your social life around how do I have regular conversation with the people I care about. Now, because of the non-trivial sacrifice of time attention. and energy attribute of conversation. It might cut down the number of people you can have these true relationships with, but it gives you a focus for what it means to cultivate a healthy social life. Here's when I see these people. Here's how I see these people.

I want to make sure that I'm putting in the time to set up new meetings, and sometimes this is regular and sometimes this is not regular, but this is how I conceive of my social life. And I use text messages and I use WhatsApp or whatever to help organize these events. And also, again, the share information or to tell jokes, and that's fine. but it's just that doesn't count on its own as a social life. If you were doing this with the people you care about, but you don't have to worry so much about the digital connection piece.

You know, like sometimes you're talking with them, sometimes you miss their text messages, sometimes you're on WhatsApp when you're bored, sometimes a week goes by when you don't use it as all. It's not so important because you're seeing them on a regular basis in this richer form. And the digital connection just becomes an adjunct, a logistical supportive,

a temporary distraction to the adjunct, to the actual efforts of building a sustainable meaning social life. It's also a good filter because you'll find for some people you just don't want to put in that effort. That's telling. I don't want to spend time with this person. I'll text them, but I really don't want to spend time with them. That's telling. Okay, in that proverbial tournament bracket, they just fell down to the 16th seed, if you know what I mean.

So, Sylvia, that's what I would suggest. build your social life around regular in-person conversation, not connection with the people you care about. Make the connection be more logistical. Then don't worry so much about always being involved in connection or missing connection because it's kind of beside the point. It's the sideshow. The main game, the main game when it comes to human sociality is conversation.

All right, let's do one more deep life question real quick here, and this has to do with developing values. Hey, Cal, I'm trying to heed your advice and develop a personal strategic plan document, which includes an outline of my productivity practices, my goals, and my values. But I've never actually developed values, whether for my professional life or my personal life. So I'm wondering if you can talk about your process for developing values and what that looks like for you. Thanks, Cal. So I've talked about this sum on the show in the time after this question,

was submitted. So let me just do a quick review here. What I do and what I typically recommend is that you have a values document or a values plan document that is separate. And it's your current working draft of your values. Those values then influence your vision. So for example, if you have a semester or quarterly plan for your professional life, there's a vision at the top of the plan for where you want to go with your professional life, that vision should be influenced by your values. And then in that quarterly or semester plan below that is your plan for the current quarter or semester to make progress on that vision.

So that's how I see those three things fitting together. So how do you create that value document? Well, the first thing I'm going to say is that it's important that you see that as a snapshot of your evolving sense of your values at this moment. I want to take the pressure off that this is an exercise where you go out and you figure out once and for all. These are my values, just like this is my blood type or this is my hair color. I've done that work. Boom. Because when you think of it as a definitive thing you do once and you have to get it right and then you're done, the pressure is too high. You're like, I don't know. I'm kind of making

some of this up. I'm kind of guessing at this one and you're never going to feel satisfied. So this is a work in progress. Let's start with that fundamental mindset. It's going to keep changing. Sometimes faster than others. You know, you'll have steady states for a while and then, you know, you'll have a kid, then boom, boom, boom, boom, that thing is evolving all the time, that it settles down for a while, and then something changes in your career, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, is updating a lot, that's fine. So it's a work in progress. All right, so how do you actually seed this work in progress?

There's two things you need. You need an input of information to help drive your decision-making process here, and you need reflection, time for reflection. You need learned input on the value. you driven life and you need time to think about that. And what you're doing in the time to think about it in part is you're feeling for intimations of residence. Like that feels right. I treat these intuitions, these moral intuitions with respect. And this particular thing is really resonating with me. Why? Let me try to articulate what exactly is resonating with me. Okay, now let me write that

down to my values and let me try to understand that vis-a-vis my past life experiences in times I felt proud and time I haven't felt proud and people that I admire and people I don't admire. You just have to sit there with this information to figure out what's catching your attention, what's not why, and how you actually extract and clarify it. So that's this time alone with your own thoughts. You do it walking, go into woods, do this on a regular basis. The information sources, that's kind of up to you, but you really need to be exposing yourself on a regular basis to people and ideas and philosophies that are both personifying values or grappling with values. Some of this might be philosophical. My friend Ryan Holiday, for example, draws a lot from the philosophy of stoicism.

And there's a lot of people who engage with his work on stoicism and they see what sparks those intimations and what doesn't. They're able to really help understand their life through stoicism. Theology plays a big role here. Certainly a lot of people gain a lot of moral intuitions by their encounter with theology. Now, the big argument to make here is an argument that's articulate. well in Karen Armstrong's book, The Case Against God. There's also a clip of me talking about this with Lex Friedman when I went on his podcast last March, is that the encounter with the moral intuitions generated with theology are heavily action-based.

So it's not so much I'm going to sit here and just study the Quran. And then just through peer studies, say, okay, now I have this figured out. A lot of theology, especially ancient theology, says, no, you're going to do the actions prescribed. You're going to do the five-day daily Islamic call to prayer. You're going to do the Friday through Saturday Jewish Shabbat. And through doing these actions and saying these prayers and sacrificing non-trivial time and attention to go to the synagogue, to go to the mosque, what have you, is where you begin to actually generate. The friction of action generates intuitions and insight. So that's just the asterisk I'm going to put on theological exploration of values.

It's not something you sit there and study like a biology textbook. It's actually kind of a game plan. You say, I got to start playing before I really figure out what's going on here. So I'll put that out there. The study of people is critical here as well. Biography and documentary can play a big role. Who resonates, who doesn't? Both is useful.

What is it about this person whose biography I'm reading? This is resonating with me. Why is that resonating? And you reflect on it and you pull out. Is this thing they're doing? I'm recognizing in them something I take seriously. Why is this person over here just making my blood boil? Right?

Okay, it's an anti-value is lurking there. I should understand that. Because the reverse of an anti-value might be something I really care about, but also sidestepping anti-values can be as important as stepping towards things that are important. All right. So philosophy, theology, but action-based theology, and the study of personalities through biography, through documentaries, where you begin to get this input

and the input generates the moral intuitions the moral intuitions helps you identify values through reflection you can purify and elaborate those values and then you live your life you come up with visions that are based off of these values you come up with a plan for the current quarter to try to live in that vision and now you collide with the reality of the world and you

clarify oh this is more important than I thought I got this one wrong what the hell was I thinking with that one and you iterate then as mentioned sometimes you'll be at a steady state and it's fine. And sometimes these changes will happen all the time. But just like I talk about

at the completely opposite extreme of the scale of significance at time, when you're doing daily time block planning, the goal there is not to figure out the world's best plan that'll never be broken. It's to have intention

about the time that remains in the day. That's how you win. Go all the way to the other end of the scale of time and significance. It's not about figuring out once and for all up front. These are the values that I will always live my life off

of it's having intention in this current moment about how you're living, directing it towards the things that generated that moral intuition and away from the things that generated that intuition of disgust. We've got to take those intuition seriously if we want to craft the life that's actually going to resonate with us as a particular human being. All right. So that's a good question, complicated question, complicated answer, but at least those are some clear steps you can take when going on this complicated but necessary.

journey. And I think my journey now is going to take me to the end of this episode. All right. Thanks for our calls. Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you too can submit your questions. I'll be back on Monday with a next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.