Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 123: What Is My Daily Routine?

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - Does deep work apply to everybody? [5:15] - Who watches your kids when you do deep work? [12:48] - How do I design a deeper work environment from scratch? [19:23] - What should I focus on as a postdoc? [23:39] - Do I (Cal) really not work in the evening? [28:12]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS  - How much deep leisure should I schedule if I have kids? [36:40] - How can I apply deep work in retirement? [41:28] - What is my (Cal) daily routine? [44:36]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 1, 2, 3. So today I am taking on a challenge leveled against me by some of you, the listeners, to try to make today's standard Q&A episodes shorter. I have been told, and this makes sense to me, that some of these epic Q&A episodes are too long, right, that people don't actually have time to get through an hour, 20 minutes, an hour, 30 minutes of questions.

And the issue is they might be missing interesting content that I will not return to because I just did it in a recent episode. And so there might be interesting answers that people don't hear. So I'm going to see, and I struggle with this, but I'm going to see if I can rein in the length of this Q&A episode. I would like to be closer to something like 45 minutes. So we'll see if I'm able to do it. Challenge accepted. Let's see if I can succeed. Now it looks like we got a good collection of questions here.

A quick note on these questions, by the way. the people who submit these are subscribers to my mailing list, my email newsletter list at Calnewport.com. This is the newsletter I send out roughly once a week in original essay. I've been doing this since 2007. I will occasionally send out a survey link to this newsletter that my subscribers can follow to submit questions for the podcast. So if you're not subscribed to my newsletter, you should. If or anything, just so you can be a part of submitting these questions. If you do subscribe and you have submitted questions,

I have changed the configuration on that survey, so you can come back and submit more questions. So if you have submitted a question to the latest Deep Questions podcast survey, and you have other questions that come to mind, feel free to go back to the survey and submit as many as you want. I will see them. All right, so I'm looking at the questions I pulled out for today. Again, I'm trying to do less questions and where possible have some quicker answers,

and we've got a good collection. Just to highlight two notes here. I'm going to kick off the Deep Work question. by tackling a pair of questions to get at the core notion of what deep work means, I've noticed increasingly that I have a somewhat boring, self-evidently useful technical definition of deep work. While other people have blown it into this mythical thing where it's not just an approach to how you accomplish a certain cognitive task, but where deep work has become some sort of grandiose, irresponsibly time-consuming,

navel-gazing lifestyle or something. So we're going to tackle that dichotomy between the prosaic understanding of deep work I have and the sort of straw man grandiose image that many of its critics also have. I also want to highlight in the Deep Life section, among other questions,

I am going to jump to one about my daily routine. I talked about this occasionally, but I thought it would be useful to refresh it. It's also a chance for me to come clean about some struggles I've been having. with my routine, with my work, and what I'm attempting to deploy as we head from summer in the fall to try to get this routine and the quality of this routine back to where I want it. So that's how I'll end the deep life section.

Stay tuned for that answer. All right. So we've got a lot of good material to get to today. But first, as always, we'll take a brief moment to thank one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. I want to talk about monk packs, keto nut, and seed bars. So over this past summer, I've been working hard to lose some of those pandemic pounds I had gained before I returned to the classroom, before I return to being in front of real crowds. And one of the things I've discovered is that getting rid of unhealthy snacks is critical. This is where the monk pack, keto nut and seed bars come in because these are a snack food that are healthy.

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All right, let's get started with some questions about deep work. And our first question comes from Sandra. Sandra asks, does deep thinking apply to everybody? How about when you are just an employee? All right, so as I previewed in the introduction to this week's episode, I think it's worthwhile to step back a little bit and get really clear what is meant by the team deep work. Now, Sandra says deep thinking, but I think she's referring to the concept of deep work.

And the reason why I want to get very technical about it is that I think there's two different associations with this term floating around. There's the association that I built, which I'll define here in a second, but it's very technical. very technical statement about the application of cognitive effort. And then there's this other interpretation, which I don't really understand very well, but I know it's out there. And it's often the straw man's subject of critiques. And it's a much more grandiose interpretation.

It refers to more than just a focused, if you'll excuse, to pun, cognitive task and has something to do with, I guess, a lifestyle or an attitude towards work or a approach to scheduling your time. I'm not quite sure. we're going to get into that. But let's start with the actual technical definition. Going back to the source here, my book, Deep Work. Deep Work describes an activity that has two properties. One, it is cognitively demanding.

So the thing you are doing requires mental effort. So almost certainly this means you are applying some sort of hard-won skill, some sort of complex skill. Two, the effort is done without distraction. So what I mean without distraction is you're doing the effort without context shifting. So instead of mainly working on the cognitively demanding thing, but also quick checking your inbox or quick checking your phone, you're just working on the hard thing. And there's a whole argument for why that's important because if you're quick checking, the context shifting cost is going to significantly reduce your capacity and therefore what's actually the value being generated, the thoughts being generated will be of lower quality. So deep work has these two elements.

It's hard and you're doing it without distraction. All right, so what is my argument about deep work? Well, it is, if you're a knowledge worker, you're doing work. You probably want to make sure that a non-trivial fraction of the work you're doing anyways is deep work. So that means two things. A, you're focusing on some of your time is going on codvilly demanding task. And my argument there in the book is that if it's not cognitive demanding, it's easily replicatable. So if you're not doing something that required hard-d-won skills, it's easily replicatable.

market dynamics mean that you're not going to be much rewarded for that. So if the main thing you're doing is moving information back and forth, filling in PowerPoint slides, jumping on calls, chatting about ideas, but you're not actually ever applying a hard one skill. You're not really moving the needle. If you're not really moving the needle,

that means you're not picking up new skills, you're not producing new valuable output. And ultimately, that's what you need to be doing to keep moving in your career. So you want to make sure that not everything you do during the day is just easily replicatable, low-skill efforts. Now, this may seem obvious, but one of the big points in the book Deep Work is that we lost track of the distinction between the cognitive demanding and the replicatable.

There's a satisfying patina of productive busyness that emanates from the shallow, from the easy replicatable. And I just saw that more and more people were falling into routines where they're constantly busy but weren't really doing the work that moved to needle, either on their own skills or on moving their organization forward. So it's a reminder, balance those two things, not all work is made easy, or equal rather. And then there's the without distraction part which says, okay, let's say you are making sure that some of your time is going towards this more commonly demanding tasks, sure. As long as you're

doing that, do it without the context shifting. Because if you do it with the context shifting, you're dumbing yourself down accidentally. What you're doing is going to take more time. The value what you produce will be less. The quality will be less. Right. So that is basically my deep work claim. Make sure that you're doing cognitive task at a reasonable

rate admits your other sort of work. and when you do it, do it without distraction. Okay? And that's basically it. So now we go back to Sandra's question. She says, does deep thinking or deep work comply to everybody? I mean, it applies to, I would say, most knowledge workers that have some component to their job description, which is cognitively demanding. That is some component to their job description that's creative or high skilled, which describes a lot of the knowledge workers that sort of read my books.

if that's you, then yeah, you want to make sure that you are getting enough deep work, whatever the definition of enough is into your schedule, and then when you do it, do it without distraction, because otherwise you're not really getting a ton out of that time. So as mentioned, these two aspects of deep work theory are relevant to a lot of knowledge workers, but not all of them. Let's say, for example, that you just graduate at college or 21 years old, you have an entry-level work at a knowledge-work organization.

almost by definition, you are not going to be able to do too much cognitively demanding work because you haven't yet built up any skills through experience to apply to your work. By definition, the only things you can handle when you first come in is relatively easily replicatable work because it has to be work that you as a brand new employee can do. So let's use this type of person as a case study here. In this case, this is an argument I make in a world without email, The second part of the deep work theory still applies, which is the do your work without distraction. So even if the work you're doing is non-convly demanding, it's your first month on the job and you're booking flight tickets for the person that you are supporting and you're looking up conference times from the internet, you know, and you're getting in the sandwich order for the focus group that your team is hosting the next week.

Like, you know, the standard stuff you might do in your first knowledge work position out of school. None of that is cognitively demanding in the sense that you have to focus really hard and apply hard-won skills. However, doing those things without distraction still is advantageous. Do one thing till a stopping point, then move to the next. Do that till a stopping point to move to a next. And why is that? Because if you don't, if you're trying to do multiple things concurrently, if you're trying to book those airline tickets but interleaving email while you're booking those airline tickets

and also jumping from that over to the sandwich ordering them back to the travel booking, your context shifting. And context shifting slows down your brain. So now it takes you longer to do those three things combined than it would to do them one after another. And it creates cognitive fatigue. So much earlier in the day, you're going to feel burnt out and not really able to do more things or doing what you do slowly at a low level of quality. So even without the cognitively demanding component, the avoiding distractions, the avoiding

context shifting component of the deep work theory, I think is relevant for tasks that fall well outside of the traditional boundaries of deep work. So, Sandra, I hope that makes sense. If you're in a non-entry level knowledge work position with some sort of high skilled or creative work, you want to make sure that you have a reasonable fraction of your work on cognitive demanding tasks and do it without distraction. Other types of stuff you're doing, you want to make sure to the degree possible that you're sequential. One thing after another till a stopping point before you move on to the next, that's going to be a lot less exhaustive. and I'll also get things done quicker.

So in that sense, I think the components of deep work theory applies to almost everyone in knowledge work, but they don't apply to everyone in the exact same way. Our next question here comes from Tracy. Tracy says, when I read your books, I always wonder who is watching the kids and buying and preparing to food. I'm a homeschool mom with 12 children and am just now at the point of my life where I feel like I even have blocks of time in which to focus. my last two babies are in high school. Well, first of all, Tracy, congratulations for making it to the point where the last year 12 kids are in high school, so they're fully self-sufficient. There's no diapers. There's no tantrums.

There's no fits. And, you know, you're about to get the nest emptied and quiet once again. That's no mean feat. Three children is enough for me. I can imagine getting as far as you have with 12 children, my hat is tipped. Now, the reason I wanted to include this question is that I think it pairs well with the question from Sandra that we just answered. And in particular, I think it really helps underscore, like I talked about in the introduction to this episode, that we have these multiple different interpretations about what deep work means. So when I think about deep work, I think about what I said in my answer to Sandra.

It's a very technocratic notion of when you're at the office, when you're working, it's a particular activity you can do. It has these two components. It's the thing you're focusing on is constantly demanding and that you do it with a minimum of context shifting. That's very technocratic. While at work, while you're working, make sure that your ratio of deep to shallow work is intentionally set. Otherwise, you might just drift to do mainly shallow work during the time when you're at work, and that's not going to move the needle.

when you're just thinking about that technocratic definition, questions like Tracy's, which I hear all the time, really makes no sense. You know, I mean, if I gave any other sort of advice about, hey, when you're at the office, like here's some advice I have for you. Like, for example, I know you've been using Outlook Calendar, but I would suggest using Google Calendar because it makes it easier to, you know, link up appointments.

It would be really unusual if someone's reaction to you, advocating for Google Calendar over Outlook Calendar is, well, who's watching the kids while you're doing those meetings? Because it's talking about when you're at work. You know, similarly, if I came in and said, whatever, I'm a big believer in MacBook airs instead of think pads or something, you want to come in and say, well, wait a second, when you're doing your work on that MacBook air, who's watching your kids? It would make no sense. We're just talking about when you're at work, what tools you use, how you schedule your day, what you focus on, what you don't focus on. If I came in and gave you advice about cutting down on meetings and work,

you want to come in and say, yeah, but when you're not in those meetings, who's watching your kids? Like, it won't it make sense. And I see deep work in the same thing. When you're at work, you want to actually differentiate between two different types of work and make sure that you have the right ratio. And of course, when you're at work, presumably, you have some sort of child care situation figured out, like everyone else who works in the country, when you're at the office, you don't have your kids, so you have some sort of child care set up. But when we talk about deep work,

questions like Tracy's often come up. So what this tells me is there's other interpretations out there about what deep work means. And this is really fascinating to me, and I really want to understand these other interpretations because I think they're important to people, and it will help me understand where people are coming from. So when I'm reading Tracy's question, for example,

I'm going to try to speculate here, But maybe there's a definition of deep work that's out there that has more to do with leisure. Like getting, taking time that you would otherwise, like that you're not in your normal work and taking that time to focus on something important to you or to be alone with yourself and your time. And that in some sense, it's an indulgence. And if someone is doing that, then someone else has to pick up child care responsibility. So maybe that's the interpretation going on here. I want to use the term deep work for that, though. That's more like deep leisure.

And I have a question about that later in the show, which I think we'll get into about how do you make deep leisure work when outside of work you have a bunch of kids, a bunch going on? It's a really tricky question. We'll get into that later in the show. So maybe that's what Tracy means. Another guess at what's going on here with these questions is that there might be a growing number of people who are trying to do or being forced to do full-time child care with full-time work from home. obviously the pandemic forced a lot of people to do this temporarily, but maybe there's a more general trend towards trying to do these two things at the same time. Maybe the cost of child care is such that you just can't afford to have your child in daycare. So you have to kind of try to watch your child while doing your job or some situation like this.

Now, if that's the case, I think Tracy's question makes a lot of sense because if you're trying to do full-time child care and a full-time job, it can't really do that full-time job anywhere. near full capacity, and really the only type of thing you can do is probably shallow work tasks. And so spending three hours, working on a hard problem without distraction, is impossible if you're doing full-time child care. So maybe that's the issue. And if that's the issue, I think the key here is really not how do we make deep work fit into someone who's being forced to do child care and work at the same time.

I think the real big issue here is how do we minimize the amount of people who are forced to do that? Because I think that is an impossible situation. I think a lot of parents had to. temporarily experience that during the pandemic when the schools were closed and it was really a dumpster fire for most people and that's an even bigger issue. So maybe that's where this is coming from. But I'm not sure. All I know is I get asked this a lot and it always does confuse me. Here I am thinking when you're at the office, make sure you're not just doing email,

do some undistracted time on the stuff that moves the needle. That's what I'm thinking. And I just know there's a lot of people thinking something completely different because otherwise this, who's watching your kids while you do deep work question just really kind of baffles me. So that's my attempt to try to figure out what these alternative interpretations would be, but it's something we should keep talking about. If I'm missing an alternative interpretation that's leading to these questions, please send it to me. I'm very curious about this.

But more generally, I think what's cool here and what's important here is that we work on trying to understand the different ways these terms are interpreted because it's rich and interesting to understand the cultural impact of these various terms. I think we could just give better advice and make more progress, the more we understand where people are coming from. So, Tracy, thanks for that question. I think it led to some productive discussion. Our next question here comes from James. James says, I'm starting a new job with a fairly high level of autonomy,

and I have the opportunity to start from scratch creating a deeper work environment. if you were starting from the very beginning, what would be the most important areas of focus to set yourself up in in a way that's most conducive to deep, meaningful, and fulfilling work? Well, James, we're all envious of your situation here. If I was in your shoes, the big trade-off I would have in mind is accountability or accessibility. That if you want a job that's mainly doing deep work,

mainly doing fulfilling work, you need to basically find a way to to cordon yourself off from the rest of the organization, putting up a very clear interface about how the organization interact with you and what you produce in return. Now, I will tell you right up front that this is going to require accountability. It's going to have to require you saying, value what I, measure what I ship. And if it doesn't stack up, it's a problem.

But if it does stack up, if it's highly valuable, that's how I earned a right to be over here on an island, over here out of the main flow and the main hustle and bustle of the organization. So making that more concrete, focus on doing less things, but doing them at a very high level. And so hold me accountable to that high level. Fewer things better. You want to sort of minimize the degree to which you're in the standard logistical flow of the organization. Get away from the extent possible meetings and budgets and memos going back and forth.

You want to almost treat yourself, if possible, like a contractor who's like doing this work that you then evaluate so if you could set that up and then you want a really clear interface like this is how information comes to me here's how the information comes back

you want to get away from the hyperactive hive mind you want to get away from people just grab you when they need you they shoot you text, just shoot you from slacks to shoot you emails right you kind of want to mean this bubble with a well-defined interface where information comes in in a structured way time passes and really valuable stuff comes out on the other side

that's what I would do if I was starting from scratch in a company and had a lot of autonomy, that's how I would try to design my circumstance. Now, again, the thing to underscore here, there's an idea from my book, so good they can't ignore you, great things require that you have something great to offer in return.

So if you want that autonomy, if you want to not be bothered by the normal flow of email and logistics, if you want to not have to be on Zoom all day, if you want to be able to keep your workload, the number of things on your plate very small, you have to ship stuff that's really valuable. And you have to be willing to pay the consequences

that if you don't, And this is one of the implicit benefits of the alternative, the hyperactive hive mind, is that even if you're not shipping, even if you're not able or willing or disciplined enough to produce really high value output, you can still just be really busy. I'm on Zoom all the time. I'm moving PowerPoints back and forth. I'm showing up at meetings and you're there and it's performative and you can keep your job. And that's actually, let's not dismiss that. That's actually kind of a nice implicit benefit of the hyperactive hive mind. So if you want to extract yourself from that and build this world on pitching,

or it's deeper and undistracted and autonomous and fulfilling, you can't hide behind that performativity anymore. It's like, look, James, we only hear from once a week. So the thing he ships this month better be excellent, because if he's not shipping anything, then he's out of here. I talk about this a little bit in a world without email. I give some examples of people who did exactly this, who traded accountability for accessibility.

they took themselves out of the main shallow work logistical stream at their companies, ultimately made them much more successful. It made their life much more tractable, less stressful. But there was this weight of expectation that came with it. So good question, James. If you're willing to take on that weight, I think you should try it. It's a really cool way to work. But again, it comes down to you're going to feel that pressure of like I actually still,

I have to produce now. I can't hide behind quick slack responses. I can't hide behind a calendar full of Zoom media. I have to stand behind what I actually produce. And I think there's no way to avoid that reality if you want to extricate yourself from the performative business of the hive mind. All right, let's do a quick academic question here. This one's from Randall.

Randall said, I recently completed my PhD in mathematics. And now I am moving to a post-doctoral position in a more applied area. My eventual goal is to stay in academia and apply for a tenure track research faculty position. With that in mind, what do you think are the most wildly important objectives I should focus on for the next two years? Well, Randall, there's not much mystery here. That objective is really good published papers. What is really good mean? Unambiguously competitive venues attract citations.

It's all that matters. And all that matters for you right now, if you want to try to get a faculty position. But I'm going to step back, one step back, because I'm a little bit concerned about the tone. the tone of your question, which gives a sense of like, well, I'm doing this postdoc now and then maybe down the line I'll apply for academic positions. Where the reality, Randall is the people who want tenure-track positions at research-focused universities, not something they casually decide to do one day. Everything from your PhD through your postdoc has to be strategically aimed at accomplishing exactly that goal. In other words, you better be at a point right now after your PhD where you're almost there. You know why you're at the postdoc

is because you've published really good work as a PhD student and you just need to finish off this body of work to make the positions you want available. Maybe there's a few open problems you've been working on. You really want to get those problems done and out or there's a particular technique you want to pick up in your

postdoc and get a couple more papers. But you better have a really clear plan that leads you to these positions. This is not something that you just say, yeah, maybe one day I'll choose to teach. So I would do a ruthlessly honest reality check right now with my postdoc advisor. Do you think I can get a job at and name the type of universities that you would,

you want to position at? Right? The type of universities you would tolerate being a professor at. Am I on track to do this? What would I have to produce over the next two years to do this? And more importantly, what does that mean I have to be doing right now? Because keep in mind, Randall, in a two-year postdoc, your first six months is the entire game. Your first six months is where you're finishing off that PhD work.

you're working on your research full-time, getting it ready for publication. Your second six months is basically getting that stuff published. Then the next year is really you're on the job market. And the stuff you work on that year won't be published yet in time for your job interviews. So your first year is the last year. Your first year of a two-year postdoc is the last year you have to produce stuff. And to work for that production is happening in the first six months. You really need to know right now, am I on track for one of these positions?

How much more do I need to produce? What does that need to be great? because that work probably has to happen in the next six months. You better have a plan for that tomorrow. So do that ruthlessly honest reality check. Now, if it's like, yeah, Randall, you're killing as a PhD, like a couple more papers to finish off this work, you should be good. This is just a great reminder.

It helps you schedule. Great. This is what I'm working on this fall. I know exactly what I'm doing. You may also get news you don't like, which is like, Randall, I mean, your publications are okay, but honestly, these R1 universities are not really in your future. There's nothing that's going to happen in the next year at this postdoc that's going to change that.

if that is the case, be very wary because you have a valuable degree. If a mathematics doctorate and if the teaching positions you want are not in your cards, do you really want to give two years of labor to an academic advisor at a cost that is vastly under your market value? and you have a PhD in mathematics with a focus and probability, you could be making serious bank as a quant at a Connecticut-based hedge fund like tomorrow. I'm talking 10 times what you're going to make as a postdoc. So you better be, that's all I'm trying to say here,

and this is my, in general, my mantra about any post-undergrad education. Be very clear about I'm trying to do this, what I'm doing now for sure will get me there. I have evidence for what I'm doing now is the step I need to get to this place that I want to get. So just do that reality check, Randall. I think whatever the answer is, you're in a fantastic position. But don't just wander through this postdoc

and then discover two years from now, oh, I'm not really going to get a faculty job. And I just wasted two years being really cheap labor when I could have been, you know, buying a helicopter or whatever it is that those quants do who make all that money up there in Connecticut. All right, let's do one last deep work question. This one comes from Jeff. Jeff says, for years, you have mentioned that you complete your workday in the late afternoon so as to leave your evenings free. However, you mentioned in a recent podcast that you were recording it during the evening. You have also mentioned you often write blog post at night. Can you explain what type of activities you do at night? Well, Jeff, that's a good question. I am not good at working in the evening. This has always been true of me. One of the reasons, why I developed the highly time-efficient, effective study techniques that were described in my

second book, How to Become a Straight Day Student, is because I didn't like working at night like the other students. So I mainly shut down my day somewhere between 5 and 5.30. I almost never do Georgetown work in the evening. There are obvious exceptions for it. I have some collaborators in Asia, so sometimes the only time we can have a research conference call is at night just from a time zone perspective. and paper deadline.

Sometimes I'll be working with a group of collaborators on a paper that's due at midnight, Eastern time, and we'll obviously end up working that evening. But those circumstances are few and far between. So I basically don't do university-related work in the evenings. Famously, I used to, and by famously I mean, okay, to the 17 people who have followed my blog for the last 14 years. I always used to talk about my blog post, my weekly essay is something I would write in the evening. I used to have a really good routine for that. I would write it after the kids went to bed in my brown chair.

I'm actually the record player. I haven't done that as consistently in recent years. In part, as I get more kids and my kids get older, there's not as often this clear break of, okay, they're in bed at 7.30. Now, here's a nice time to write. So I tend to do that writing. Sometimes I do it in the evening. A lot of times I'm just doing that during my normal time blocked work day. you know, between my 9 to 530 hours.

My podcast, sometimes I do this during the week. The preferred schedule is Sunday morning, but sometimes I do during the week. I very rarely do it in the evening. So I'm not quite sure what podcast you were referring to. Oh, actually, you know what I think I know what that was. That was after vacation. I think I was on vacation and I had add, you know, sponsor responsibilities. I had to get an episode out the next morning.

And like literally didn't get home until the afternoon. So that's really rare for me to record a podcast in the evening. evening. My energy is just not there. The only other exception to my 9 to 5 rule is I used to pre-pandemic being a habit of when I was doing article writing. So in particular, my New Yorker writing, when I wanted to really break the seal on a piece, which they're intimidating, right? Intimidating the work on. I would go at like happy hour hours. So this could be after five, but, you know, like 430 to 6 or something like this. So a little bit later than normal, and I would go to this a coffee shop down for my HQ

Tacoma Bevco shout out to Bevco Chris and Seth and I would go to Bevco and they serve alcohol at night and I would go in there and be like let me get a beer

and it was all about breaking the barrier to getting started on an intellectually very demanding thing so I did get in the habit of writing or at least starting writing

on New Yorker articles at a happy hour at this coffee shop that was near where I live Now, during the pandemic, that went away because they moved their seating outside and instituted a new laptop rule, which makes a lot of sense because especially during the pandemic, I think, our schools in our county were closed for most of the last year. So if that seating had a, you were allowed to use laptops, it would have just been immediately full all day with parents working from home. So I get that. So I got knocked out of that habit.

However, I think the, BEPCO has added a few seats back inside. I have to see if there's a no laptop rule or not. I think I would like to get back to that. I just need to have a physical environment where it is socially appropriate to come and sit with your laptop and actually do some work. But that would be kind of in the evening,

you know, at most once a week, but only really when I had an article that I was working on. All right, Jeff, so, yeah, more or less, that is my thing. I work backwards from those time constraints and try to make everything fit. Sometimes it's frustrating.

Like, I have more work I have to do. But what I've learned is in the long run, you produce more. Fitting your work during work hours, trying to shut down and relax and ideate and rest your mind and do family stuff and do other stuff when you're not working. Long run gives you a lot of sustainability. And so you miss out on the short term possibility of doing a little bit more work, but it has no real impact on the scale of years on how much important stuff you actually produce.

And as I talked about last week in my deep dive on slow productivity, that's the scale. I care about what you produce on the scale of years. and for that scale, this fixed schedule productivity notion, if I worked during these hours that I'm done, has really worked well for me. All right, so now in the interest of speed, let's move on to some questions about the deep life, but before we do, we'll briefly take a break to hear from

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All right, let's do some questions now about the deep life. Our first such question comes from Stacey. Stacey says, I work from home full-time and have a flexible schedule. but I'm also a busy mom with school-aids kids. I have been really striving to incorporate more personal and leisure activities in my life, but sometimes I feel like maybe I'm spending too much time on them at the expense of other things. I need to get done. I'd love to do them all daily, but when I do, it does take up a lot of time.

Do you have any tips for juggling a variety of personal activities without letting it take up too much time each day? Well, Stacey, it's a good question. I mean, I think we should start with a reality check, which is if you have multiple kids and their school age, and I am speaking here from very much first-person experience, it does severely limit how much, let's call it, deep leisure, that you're able to schedule. It is going to be much less than someone with no kids can schedule.

It's going to be much less than someone with, let's say, like, one infant is going to be able to schedule as well. So we'll just start from that foundation because I really want, our expectations to be lower and by R I mean mine because I'm just trying to make myself feel better here because I don't do a lot of deep leisure these days let's keep our expectations humble

and then we'll be really excited by what we are able to get. All right, with that foundation in mind, what are some things that might help here some things that I have tried? First of all, take advantage of work hours. So again, I'm assuming you say you work from home full time,

but I assuming while you were working, there's alternative child care. if we're in a different situation where you're trying to do child care and working at home, that's a different type of dumpster fire that we should deal with separately. But whether you're at an office or working at home, if there is a set period, a normal workday in which you are not expected to be involved with child care, steal some of that time. I'm a believer in that.

And even the fact that I'm using the word steal here, I feel like is not fair to the average worker. What I mean is if you get your act together from a productivity perspective, you time block plan, you daily, weekly, strategic plan, you do full capture, you have your task boards, you're really on top of things, you're really on top of your time, you're really on top of what's on your plate, then put in time into your schedule for leisure activities during the actual workday. I think that's completely fine. I think you produce more as an employee if you do that.

You're happier. Your energy is better. And so that's one place to get back time. Take advantage of the childcare you do have to get back some time for you. outside of that, you just have to lean into the fact your time is more limited. One of the things I've tried to do is redefine more of my deep leisure notions to be things that involve the family that involve the kids. Getting that type of leisure benefit out is something where I'm also with the kids. That makes me feel a lot better because if there's one thing I have plenty of experience doing,

it's just being with watching those kids doing things with those kids. So trying to come up with activities or projects or outings to do with kids or different subsets of the kids. that feel like to become a real source of leisure. So I think that's really important. And then otherwise, I would say, work through your deep work buckets. Make sure you have keystone habits in each of those, right? So you're touching on each of those buckets

and doing things as relevant to each of those buckets, but just be much more tolerant of the rate at which those things happen. I follow this principle. There's the areas of my life that are important. In each of these areas, there's sort of keystone habits. I definitely want to make sure I'm doing

so that I am signaling to myself that these parts of my life are important. And a lot of these lives aren't just family. But because I have family, the rate at which these things have to happen is much less. So it's not every day I have to do this contemplation thing and I have to do this Constitution thing and I have to do this community connection thing and I have to do the celebration thing. And it adds up to two hours a day because I don't have that time. But maybe it's every week each of those gets touched on in a very systematic way.

and even if it's briefly, at least I'm still getting that benefit of there's things I care about that I spend time on and they make time for. It's just how much time that is and the duration in between that time might be quite a bit different for someone with school age kids than someone with no kids or older kids or very young kids. So Stacey, I'm basically just talking to myself here because I grapple with the same issue. But this is what I've done. And just a quick summary, leverage your high productivity to bring schedule time out of your day on a regular basis for your. yourself. Redefined a lot of deep leisure to involve your kids and your family and then make sure you touch on all the parts that are important in your life, but be willing to do that at a slower rate. Give yourself some slack. Do it at a slower rate than someone who maybe

has a ton of discretionary time. All right, we have a question here from Adam. Adam says, how can you apply deep work to retirement? I'm a semi-retired tech entrepreneur. Mostly I'm focusing on staying fit and doing interesting projects. I try to do a couple hours of deep work per day, but mostly fail at it. Mentoring startups at a local incubator and students at a local coding school, too, my wife and I also travel quite a bit. So, Adam, I have two thoughts for you. First, this applies to your specific question.

I think an issue here is that you're defining deep work as some sort of standalone activity separate from these other things you are doing. Deep work is not a standalone activity. It is an approach to an existing activity. So you have various activities in your semi-retired life. You have exercise. You have startup mentoring. You have student mentoring at local coding school.

And you have travel. These are the things you mention. Deep work theory would say, okay, when you're doing these things, you know, do them one at a time. If it's cognitively demanding, give it your full attention without distraction. Don't contact shift while you're working. You will get more out of your time spent. So it's an approach to stuff you're already doing.

So it's not about, okay, in addition to this stuff, how do I find time for doing deep work? The question is instead, I have this stuff I'm doing. I want to be careful when I'm doing these things that I'm spending enough of my time in a state of depth to get the most out of this time to get the most out of these activities. Right. So I think that's the right way to look at it. The second thing I'm going to say here, which is more general, is when you're thinking about retirement, work to buckets, here are the areas of my life that are important to me. and each of these areas I want a keystone habit or a small number of keystone habits, things I come back to on a regular basis that signal to myself that I take these things

seriously and I'm willing to do non-required time on a regular basis towards these things I care about. Once you have those signals in place, go bucket by bucket and overhaul that part of your life to make sure that that part of your life is getting the proper attention and respect. You've oriented your life around it to an appropriate extent. one month at a time, six weeks at a time, kind of go through these buckets. You're basically rebuilding your life in a structured way. You're going to end up then with sort of smaller habits, keystone habits you do as well as larger projects, as well as just general ways that you live.

And it might lead to some drastic changes. Like now you buy a cabin that you go to every weekend or you buy into a small business in town that you're supporting as a nonprofit. It can lead to some pretty drastic changes in your life. But the only thing I'm trying to say here is have some structure, I guess, and tell how you plan these activities. Don't just do a bunch of stuff. Figure out the buckets that matter to you, get the keystone habits,

overhaul each of those parts of your life. As a semi-retired entrepreneur, you're going to have a lot of time autonomy. You're also going to have some probably flexibility. You have financial affluence. You have the time affluence. You have a lot of flexibility to throw at these issues. So be very structured about building your life,

building the deep life post-retirement. As part of that deep life, there will be certain activities that will benefit by you taking a deep work approach to them. So I hope those distinctions help a little bit. All right, let's do one last question here. This comes from SP. SP asks, what is your daily routine?

Well, it's a good question. I think there's a general template to my day. And then the details of that template really vary on A, what day of the week it is, and B, what season we're in. So starting with the general template, I'm usually with the kids first thing in the morning. So I will get them their breakfast and empty the dishwasher, sort of handle that morning routine with the kids.

If my little one is up early enough, I'll often read while he's watching a PBS Kids episode in the morning before we really get started with the morning when the other kids wake up. So I'm able to fit some reading sometimes in that morning. but my mornings are, I'm with the kids, which is basically more or less been my routine ever since we've had kids. I'm pretty much used to that.

All right. Then at some point, I shift to work. So if this is during the school year, it's going to be after the kids go to school, if this is in the summer, you know, maybe after the kids are off to camp

or whatever's going on, right? But there's a point where the kids are gone. All right? And now I switch over to work mode. Let's put a pin in what work mode means, because that really, again, is going to depend on the day of the week and the season of the year. But I work until my shutdown complete, my shutdown routine.

So we talked about earlier in this episode. Somewhere between 5 and 530 is my goal. The exception would be Fridays. I try to shut down earlier for Fridays to practice an actual Shabbat from sundown Friday through sundown Saturday, but we'll put that aside. And then it's family time, leisure time after the shutdown. I mean, these days, again, going back to Stacey's question,

it's mainly family time because we've got a lot of, kids and it takes a lot of time. But I try as much as possible that when I'm not working, don't want to be thinking about work. I want to just be pure family time. It's basically a tradeoff I tried to make as my work got more higher stakes and more demanding. You're like, that might be the case, but I want to keep that in my work hours. I have more things going on, then things are going to take me longer to get done because

I'm not expanding the amount of time I'm really making available to do this work. And we'll see. We'll see if that works. Okay, so then what happens during my actual workday? Again, it varies. During the semester, so I start my semester at Georgetown next week as I'm recording this, during the semester, I differentiate between teaching days and non-teaching days. I typically teach two days a week.

And those days are all about teaching and students and logistics. So I'll prep, horse prep first thing in the morning, quick administrative, you know, dash driving to campus. I figured this out, by the way, almost immediately after moving to the sub, you know, moving outside of downtown D.C., moving to the sort of close in suburbs. But I used to be walkable to campus. I figured out pretty early. I used to, when my wife would leave for work, I'd be like, well, I don't want to just be home, so I'll leave for work too. And then I discovered about D.C. traffic. And it took me about three months until I had this.

epiphany, I don't have to drive to Georgetown during rush hour, right? Because, yeah, I could drive during rush hour, but the first thing I do in my Georgetown, when I just do that first thing at home, and then drive to Georgetown after that and avoid the traffic, and I saved the time from the traffic. It doesn't, it doesn't matter, right? I can do my prep at home just as easily at Georgetown. And so that was a great innovation, because if you wait till 10, you know, or 10 or pass to drive to campus, it's wonderful. And if you do it at 9, it's terrible. All right. So I prep, do some admin, get ready, drive to, drive into campus, teach. Then it's like office hours and meeting with my TAs and committee meetings.

And I just kind of lean into those days, not deep work. It's not time to think deep thoughts. Like, you know, this is the teacher portion, administrative portion of my Georgetown, my Georgetown career, get focused on those days. I sometimes do some deep work into drives. Like if there's a proof I'm stuck on or an article I'm trying to figure out, you know, the drives are boring. So I'll sometimes work on those in the drive.

And so I've been known to be there in the parking garage at Georgetown sort of frantically taking notes so I don't forget, don't forget what I was just thinking about. So you will see me in the underground parking garage under the Levy Center with my laptop out in my car, frantically trying to type up my notes so I don't forget what I think about. But basically those days are about that. Okay.

the other days of the week they also have administrative stuff there's also going to be some meetings and this and that meeting with students meeting with whatever doing some interviews and stuff but I tend to try to keep those in the afternoon so that the mornings can be much more deep work focused like this semester I teach Monday Wednesday

so I really want Tuesday Thursday and three out of four Fridays a month I can just start the day when I have my best thinking which is with my first coffees in the morning and really do deep work and then expect you know hey in the afternoon there'll be other stuff going on some of those days I'm on campus, some of those days I do at home, just depending on what's going on. One Friday, one Friday a month, I have a faculty meeting, so I'll definitely be on campus that day.

So I can't do deep work first thing in the morning, so I'll usually maybe go try to schedule some, a deep session for right after that, right after that faculty meeting if possible. Then as mentioned, like to, if possible, to practice Shabbat Friday, late afternoon, all throughout Saturday. I need that. I need that more than I used to because my work is now. much more stressful. It used to be, I worked on some academic papers, and I was often writing a book, and now it's just everything's higher stakes. It's like you're running a research group.

It's not just you're writing books. It's, you know, good morning America, and easy to come do this, and PBS wants you to jump on this, and, you know, there's a contract negotiation happening over here, and we're trying to hammer out a deal with your publisher for, like, a lot of money, and there's a sticking point, and it's all higher stakes, it's all more stressful. So now I really need time where I'm away from that. And again, this comes back to my slow productivity mindset of keep coming back to the hard stuff again and again. In the long run that produces what matters, don't sweat so much in the short run exactly the pace of what you're doing it.

You know, if you have to take away some time so you can have a Shabbat, if you take away sometimes you can end to 530, it's not going to make a big difference in the long run in terms of what you produce, but it could really have a big impact on your mental health in the short period. So that's basically what it looks like during the school year. The summer is a lot more flexible. I love the summer. So that's basically my routine. A couple other things that's going on right now. During my deep work time, I'm really trying, I switch to it this summer, a notion of like I'm working on one thing at a time. As hard as I can until I get to a stopping point, then switch to the next thing.

I'm not doing things concurrently anymore. And so this counts for both research and writing. So, okay, if I'm working on a draft of a New Yorker piece, that's what I'm doing until I'm done. Okay, now if I'm working on a proof for a research paper, I'm working on the step of the proof until I'm done all in. Then I'm moving on to the next thing. It feels in the moment frustratingly slow because you're doing things sequentially. So you might go a while before you touch on this one thing. But I discovered it's the pace is the same at the end.

So whether you're switching back and forth rapidly between two things for two weeks or spending one week on one thing and another week on the other, it still takes two weeks to get them both done. But in the latter scenario, you're probably doing it with a higher sort of quality. So I'm working on that. The other thing I'm trying to do this fall is get back to much more of a hardcore monk mode on demands on my time that are not critical to what I do. So what I mean about this is there's the Georgetown demands, which is just part of my job. Committee meetings and meetings with students. That's great. I'm all in on that.

But the writing part of my life just absolutely, absolutely floods me. with requests for my time. I often will tell my wife. My joke is, here's my simulation of everyone in the world. I need your time. It's crazy. Everyone needs you.

Can you read this? Can you jump on a phone? Can you come on my show? Can you blurb this? Can you come do this interview? Can you fill out this contract? Can you sign this release for this talk? Can you come speak virtually at my thing?

It's really, you know, maybe it's a good problem to have, but it's really hard to overestimate the degree to which, all day long everyone needs me to do things. And it's a problem because these things are not on my critical path of, am I producing a good book? Am I producing a New Yorker piece I'm proud of?

Am I producing a research paper that's going to get citations? Am I teaching a class that's going to make a difference in the student's lives? Those are the things that matter to me. And this stuff that most tangentially helps those things, but it really gets in the way. So I'm trying and I'm bad at it. I'm bad at it. But I'm trying to say no to basically all non-Georgetown things that aren't absolutely critical.

And again, things slip through because some things are big. The day after I'm recording this, I'm doing Good Morning America. Like, I don't want to say no to Good Morning America, but there's, for every Good Morning in America, there's 10 other things that are a tier below that, like, I know the people,

or I kind of know the person, or it would be interesting, and I just have to say no. I'm giving a virtual talk today. I'm giving a virtual talk tomorrow. I'm giving two virtual talks next week. I probably shouldn't be doing all those virtual talks. But at the time, it just kind of made sense.

Like, I like these people. That's an interesting group. They're going to buy some books. It makes my publicist happy. I got to get better. So, excuse me, this is where I am definitely struggling, and I'm trying to make a difference. I am trying to cut down on the stuff in my life that I don't have to do, so I can get back to the rhythm. The place I was when I was working on deep work, where I was writing research papers I was proud of,

I was connected to my students and always had some big writing project I was doing in the background, but also a lot of when I wasn't working, I wasn't working. And there's other things that I was connected to. So I will let you know how this goes. That is a big thing I'm doing right now in my daily routine. I'm trying to keep September and October clear. I've kind of failed already the last couple of days by saying yes to things I shouldn't have. But now I'm going to try to put down the hammer.

So we'll see how it goes. So SPI appreciate the chance to vent a little bit. It always helps to let off a little bit of this steam. All right, let's see here. 55 minutes. I was trying to do 45 minutes, but progress. 55's not so bad. All right.

Thank you, everyone who sent in your questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.