Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 124: LISTENER CALLS: Preserving Depth in the Vast Shallows

Episode Date: August 26, 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. - Organizing notes on technical articles and books. [3:00] - Finding depth amidst a vast shallows. [8:35] - Should I get an MBA if it's free? [24:12] - Optimal counts of deep projects. [33:30] - The value habit. [36:37]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode is sponsored in part by Monk Pack, 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. They contain one gram of sugar or less, only two to three grams of net carbs and are only 150 calories, but they still taste great. Sweet and salty. They have a crunch from the whole nuts and steeds, but still manage to be soft and chewy. So when you have a craving for a junky treat, you can grab the monk pack keto nut and seed bars and get something that satisfies that craving, but without the junk.

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then enter the code deep at checkout to save 25% off your purchase. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions, listener calls, mini-episode. Now, I'm realizing, as I continue with my efforts

to shorten the Monday episodes of the podcast. So both episodes are right around 45 minutes. I'm probably going to have to stop referring to these as many episodes and just call them episodes. But I'm still not there yet. I'm still trying hard to cut down my episode length. I just always have a lot to say. Speaking about having a lot to say, we have five good listener calls today.

Some deal with deep work. Some deal with the deep life. I'm always looking for more calls. It's easy to submit them. You can do it straight from your browser. Just go to calnewport.com slash podcast. There's a link there. There's a link there to a website

where you can record your calls and they come straight to me. All right, so that's it. Let's do no more of this intro banter and get right into our very first question. And this one has to do with reading strategies for a newly minted research assistant. Hi, Kyle.

My name is David. I'm a research assistant in Germany at a technical university. and I'm quite new to the job, so I have to read a lot of stuff to get into the topics I'm working on from papers to books. And I'm interested in your reading strategies. For example, if you use certain tactics like PQ4R or even if you do speed reading and stuff like this and what your thoughts about this are. Thank you. Bye.

Well, David, I have a few thoughts on collecting notes on technical articles and technical books. These are ideas I've developed in the context of academia, which is the context you're in. But I think it's also generally applicable to almost any position where keeping up with some sort of technical literature, be it scientific, be it philosophical, be it business theory, any situation where that could be useful. So there's really two or three principles, depending on how I want to break it up, that I feel. focus on. First, I want to collect notes on a given topic in whatever the software or format is that you would write your normal papers. Okay, so I do theoretical computer science. We use a markup language called latex. I want my notes in latex. So whatever it is that you use to write up or typeset formal papers in your field, use that software. Most importantly, get the citations for whatever you are taking notes on, properly encoded, whatever system you use for bibliographies or citations.

So, for example, in my world, a computer scientist, we use in computer science, we use lay tech to mark up mathematical documents. And we use an adjunct program called BibTech. So what we do here is the papers or books or articles we want to cite, we put them in a very special format, a very specific format. It's sort of like an XML style format, key attribute value pairs. We put into a document called a bib file. Then we can reference it. So every citation in this file has a key, a title. And then in our papers, we can reference citations by the title,

and the software will suck out all the information and properly format the citation, whatever format you want to cited in. Different disciplines use different softwares, but all disciplines have some sort of way they keep track of citations in a format that makes it easy to use those citations letter. So do that from the very beginning. So you're using the software you will use to write articles, books, or papers in your discipline. Citations go into the right citation management software right away,

so that every time you reference a paper, you can actually have a formal proper reference. Okay. Two, I create annotated bibliographies, roughly speaking, broken up by topic, where I just have sections about, okay, here's a given topic, subsections for given papers, notes in those subsection. about what's relevant from those papers. When I want to cite a result from another paper, all the citation information is there in my citation software,

so I can formally and clearly cite and link these papers back and forth. I do varied granularity note-taking. So what this means is at first, let's say I just want to know about a paper what's in it. I might have a pretty big overview. Yeah, this looks at this problem and this problem in these conditions. I don't, that's it. Now, maybe later I come back and say,

actually, this has a bound in it, an algorithm. I really think might be relevant for what I'm working on. Then I'll read that carefully and take up detailed notes on just that thing, right? So you can increase the level of detail or not as needed on demand. So in these annotated bib documents, there could be a bunch of papers listed where you just bullet pointing like, this looks at this problem, this looks at this problem, this looks at this problem. And then suddenly you might have a 10-page digression breakdown of a particular result that you really work through the math and rewrote it in your own words so that later on you can understand it. And this is fine. And all these granularies can exist together in the same annotated bib document.

Everything is formally cited. Everything references each other formally because you're using, again, the software and bibliography management tools that are standard in your field. Finally, I would say the organizing principle of this approach is reducing friction on the front end. There's just not time to have some sort of general approach to reading where you say, I always read five papers a day. I always break the papers down into great detail and take notes on it. You really should be more on demand. I need to know more about this field for this paper. you know about all the different research that was done on this problem

and I'm just going to go out there and find those and get them in the bib. Okay, now I'm writing, oh, this particular paper from in there is very similar to what I'm doing, so I need to understand that well. So now that section of the bib gets longer. In other words, you're growing this thing on demand, but over time, you're capturing a really good view into some of these fields with close dives on relevant results that might be relevant to your work, and it's very effective. So you don't want to expend work unless you need it.

but when you do expend work, you want to capture the results in such a way that it's maximally useful for your future self. So this is my approach, David. It's like a giant paper, haphazardly written is what it looks like. In the formal software, I've got some things are short, some things are long. I fill these things in on demand,

but I keep the citations formal from the very beginning. So when it comes time to cite a bunch of this stuff, it's already in my bibliography management software, and it's boom, boom, boom. The citations are right there. All right, let's shift gears here and do a question about how do you manage shallow work demands when you do want some shallow work demands, but if you say yes to everything, it's overwhelming.

Hey, Cal, this is a question about deep work styles. So I'm a brand new promoted and tenured associate professor at a big R1, and I'm also a woman of color. And so those two things combined ought to tell you that my service load is about to just go off the charts. It already is off the charts, and time blocking has helped a lot with that. but I've had some protection as an assistant professor that I won't as an associate. And I actually want these service requests. I'm planning a career in upper administration.

And so serving on these big university and college committees is actually really important for my professional growth. What this means, though, is that I need to change the way that I'm deep working. Up until now, I've been able to work in rhythmic style to set aside hours almost every morning to do my deep work. or bimodal and really protect the days that I'm not on campus. And that's going to change pretty significantly, I think, in the future. And I would like to develop the skill of a more journalistic style of deep work.

I know that you mentioned that's more your style in the book. And I remember you also mentioning that you sometimes schedule your deep work way in advance in several weeks out. So I'm curious if you have any tips on how one could switch from one style of deep work to another. Well, let me first offer both congratulations and condolences. The congratulations is for getting tenure, and very exciting milestone, very difficult to do,

especially at an R1 University, and my condolences for the service load that is going to usher in. I went through this back in 2016, so I know very much both sides of that coin. Now, I have a few thoughts to share here. all of these thoughts are built on this foundational observation you made that you're interested in a long-term administrative track. So you're not coming at this from a perspective of how do I, Richard Feynman this, how do I avoid all service? You want to do service.

You find it useful, especially at the university level. You want that experience. You want to give back to university. And you want to set the foundation for being in an administrative role. So we're coming at this topic from that particular foundation. All right, so with this in mind, I had three thoughts to share. The first thought is we need to be realistic. The path you are on is going to have non-trivially more service and administrative work

than you are experiencing as an assistant professor. Therefore, something has to give. So you're going to have to probably change your expectations for research output. This means, among other things, you're probably going to need to moderate your expectations for how much research you put out. My general sense about this is that the right tradeoff when you're in the situation is to do less but better. So pull back how much you put out, but make what you put out at a really high level of quality. There's an in-between that you could do instead where you pull back what you do some and the quality is mixed.

So this is what happens, I think, when newly promoted associate or newly promoted full professors try to maintain a similar research output to before the extra administrative load. And what happens is the output comes down some, but the quality gets mixed. And I don't think that's not the best mix because the best choice because the sort of mixed quality output is very stressful. And it's not as helpful to your career. It's just producing even less than that. But what you produce is very good. I call this the Drew Faust rule because I think about Drew Faust, the president of Harvard,

publishing the Republic of Suffering, while the president of Harvard. Now, Drew Faust cannot publish articles and books when she was the president at the same rate as, let's say, another history professor in the department without that huge administrative overload. But the book she published was fantastic, and it won a bunch of awards. I read it. It's a fantastic book, right? There's a Drew Faust rule. I can't do as much work anymore, but the stuff I'm going to do is really high quality. That's going to keep your reputation very much alive in the field.

And at the same time, it's going to make your workload much more realistic. That would be my first thought. Do less but do better. All right. Thought number two, if I was you, I would then figure out how much deep work on research you need to do to implement the Drew Faust rule. Not publishing like you did, but publishing really good stuff slowly, but regularly. How does that work? And we can talk in a second about deep work styles, but this might be bimodal at a large scale.

The summer looks different than the fall. It might be bimodal, and, you know, you do. Fridays you work on this, or it could be rhythmic, you know, I just, I start every day with it. I don't know that it really matters so much exactly the planning philosophy so much as it is that you figure out how much work you need for this new realistic load. Fix that. Make that unimpeachable and then face the consequences. And by face the consequences, I mean, okay, and then see what happens when that work can't be violated, what happens to the rest of your professorial life. I call this fixed schedule productivity.

The idea is the back pressure of the rest of your life getting out of control then pushes you to control that other part of your life. So in other words, you set the constraints first. I'm always doing deep work. However makes the most sense for your calendar. And it might not be rhythmic anymore because of varied committee meetings or obligations you have at very times. There's no set time that's okay. Maybe it's bimodal. Maybe it's journalistic.

I mean, this is what I do. I look at the week and say, when do I want to do deep work? and then I block it on the calendar. However you want to do it, fix it. And then say what happens to everything else. Now, if you don't do the Jew Faust rule, if you say I'm going to publish a ton and let me fix that time, and then face the consequences,

but I also want to do a lot of administrative work. The top's going to blow off the proverbial house here. So this only works if it's tractable, and it's only potentially tractable if the amount of deep work you're trying to fit in is reasonable. All right, so now what do you do when you still find, I can't fit all the stuff I'm doing. Well, now you have to pull back, rein in the administrative work to fit in the time that remains.

Now, again, we're not doing a ton of deep work here. So you have plenty of time to remain. So you're not trying to squeeze a ton of work into a small amount of time. But probably you'll have too much at first. Well, there's only really two things you can do to rein in administrative work in this context. One, you can work on your habits. And you've done some of this. You time block plan.

Like that's an example of you work on a habit so that the overhead of administrative work gets smaller. Now you can fit more work in. So that's a good one. I would also probably focus on protocol or process design. So this is the big idea from a world without email. Really think through what are the common collaborations or coordination I do with various teams and various committees? For each of these, can I put in place a set system for this collaboration or coordination that gets away from just ad hoc back and forth messaging? you really free up a lot of cognitive space

when you don't have seven or eight different asynchronous back and forth conversations happening, each of which that requires you to see unscheduled messages pretty quickly after they come in and knock it back over the proverbial ping pong net. So that process is, that'll free you up, they'll get you some more space as well.

I've talked some about this before, being like the director of graduate studies at Georgetown, for example, using a ticketing system and an FAQ system for student request, having a set meeting with my department chair and program coordinator and having the set list of the things we're going to discuss they could just put up on there so we could wait till the meetings to discuss. There's various tricks, right?

But basically what we're talking about here is cut back on ad hoc back and forth messaging. That'll help. But it's not going to solve the full problem. You still will probably have too much. So what you're left with is the most powerful weapon we have, which is saying no. Now here's the thing. you're saying no right now to lots of things. As an associate professor at an R1 university,

there's more things coming at you than you can do. So I'm sure you have said no to many things. It's just not tenable. It's not tenable to say yes to everything, right? So the only question is, what is your criteria for saying no? And I think what most people do, and this is an issue,

is what I call the 20% rule. They wait until they have about 20% too much stuff on their plate. the stress that causes then gives you psychological or emotional cover to start saying no to things. Because you say, look, I'm not being irresponsible, I'm not letting you down. I'm feeling enough pain now

that that's causing enough back pressure to give me cover to say, no, I can't join that additional committee. And if I don't feel that pain, then I might worry. You know, maybe I'm just being selfish. Maybe I am, you know, maybe I'm just not standing up for the team.

And I got to tell you, this happens. You're going to hear this. I hear it a lot. I have been yelled at by various people in my academic career for saying no to things. People who don't know the whole context. What else is on your plate? What else has to do? I've been derided. I've been yelled at. I've been told you're not a team player. I have had the other work I do, be belittled. I've had deans call me into their office to say, why aren't you going to do this thing? And I have to say, I just can't. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not easy. So the 20% rule gives us emotional cover because like, well, I just feel such pain.

It gives me motivation to say no. Here's the issue with the 20% rule, though. Let's say instead you had a way of saying no when you got to the right load. So not 20% too much, but 0% too much. Just like just about the right load for your time. This looks the same to the outside world. You're saying yes to a bunch of things. You're saying no to a bunch of things.

The difference between the things you say yes to no to, that gets you from zero percent overloaded to 20 percent overloaded. The difference is very small. It might be a couple committees here, a couple reviews here. So, no one notices. It doesn't materially change your perceived level of engagement and participation. But for you, personally, it's everything. Someone who's not overloaded is in a psychological perspective much better off than someone

who's 20 percent overloaded. So I don't like the 20 percent rule. I think it's a bad heuristic. It doesn't make a big change in how much value you bring to your organization, but has a huge negative impact on your own mental health. So how do you get to just the right load and not have to depend on the 20% rule? I think quotas are fine. That's typically what I try to use.

And let me just preface this by saying, I'm bad at this and I'm working on it. Kind of giving myself a pep talk here. This is something I, in Monday's episode at the end, I talk about how, you know, my imitation of everyone in the world right now is how can I get more Cal's time and I'm kind of struggling and I have a mea culpa that I'm not doing a great job of saying no, a lot of things. So this is me giving myself a pep talk. Let me just parentheses say that in the parentheses. But the quota system is basically the best tool I have. So you say, here's the different types of service things that are important. And I keep a rough quota about how many of these can I do per semester or per year and do them very well without being overloaded. And you're

going to have to calibrate this quota. It might take a couple semesters to do so. But you get pretty instinctual about this. And then once you have that quota calibrated, once it's full, now you're saying no, not just arbitrarily. Like, nah, I just generally feel busy. You say no, because I keep a quota, right, that I do three committees.

One at the university level, two, the department level, whatever. This is like what I can basically manage per semester. I already have my three. So I love this. I love what you're doing, but no. Or, yes, I would love to do this, be on this program committee or do this peer review.

but I have a quota of how many of those I can do well each semester. And you know what? I've already filled that. I've already filled that quota. So, you know, I can't do it. And the key here, by the way, I should add is don't dot, dot, dot, dot, but what if I do X, Y, and Z? Don't do a fallback offer.

Just say, I'm sorry. I can't. Here's why. Period. Silence. Let the silence stand. Don't say, but I could give you some thoughts. Or if you really would.

In the moment, that feels like it's socially. helpful, but it's not really. Just no. Be nice about it, but no, without that extra offer to do a little bit of work at the end. Okay. Also, when you're trying to say no, don't try to get the other person to say you don't have to do it. Don't explain how you're so busy and say, but you know, if you really need me to and hopefully say now you don't have to. No, you have to say no. All right. So if you have a quota, it's easier because now people do not conceptualize your no as this person doesn't want to do work. They instead conceptualize your no as. this person has a quota for three committees per semester. So if they're going to be upset at you, what they have to be upset about is a quota and say, I think you should do more than three committees per semester. But often the quotas are reasonable. So they say, I guess that is reasonable. I mean, three committees is enough for a semester.

So they're not arguing this abstract point that, like, you should help them or not. They're arguing the much more concrete point of whether or not your quota is reasonable. And that is an argument that's way more non-personalized and one that you're much more likely to come out in their mind on the, the positive end of the spectrum here. That's probably what I would do is I would just have these quotas. And then when you do the work that you say yes to, you do it really well. And you get that reputation for it. And if you're someone who's doing work really well and says yes to a lot of things,

but also has clear quotas, I'll tell you what people will respect that, especially in the academic context. What people don't respect is two things people don't respect in this context. The complete freeloaders, you say, I don't care. I looked at my contract. I don't have to do any service. So no, you know, the Richard Feynman approach. You're not really being a team player, right?

So that doesn't go well. The other thing people don't respect is just my hair's on fire. Oh my God, I'm so stressed and I don't know. And yeah, I can't do it. Or you say, yes, and then you wait a week and say, I'm sorry, I got to drop out of this. I'm just too overloaded. People don't respect that either. But when you got your act together, like, I'm on it, your time block planning, you have your protocols.

You do good service. People see you do good work. you clearly communicate. I have these clear quotas is what allows me to do my work well. And people are like, great, I hope I make it

into one of those quotas. I really like working with this person. Yeah, I have no problem that she said no to this because she's doing these other three things, but I hope I get on her list for the next thing.

So anyways, the reason why I'm giving you such a long answer is because I'm talking to myself too. I'm in a similar situation. So I hope those three points help. Just to very briefly summarize, moderate your expectations

for how much research you are going to produce. I recommend going to a less but better model, the Drew Faust model of I'm not going to publish nearly as frequently as before, but actually the quality of what I publish is going to go up. That's the best trade-off, given your circumstance. Two, fix the deep work time for that and protect it, and then say they'll deal with everything else afterwards.

And again, I don't have a great answer for you about which deep work scheduling philosophy is best. It's whatever feels more natural for you and your schedule. And then three, the rein back in the administrative work that remains, say no, but do so from a quota perspective. So you're saying yes before you say no and you're very clear about why. All right. I hope that helps. What do we got here now? Okay, as long as we're in a sort of academic mode, here's a, here's a question from a prospective student asking if they should get an MBA. Hey, Cal, my name's Jake. I have a question about grand school. I have a six-figure

government job and I'm thinking about taking an MBA, but I don't really have a plan for, to use it. And I know your advice is usually to not take grad school unless you have a particular plan for it. However, I was wondering if that changes at all if my employer is willing to pay for it. Love the podcast. Keep up the good work. Thanks. Well, Jake, I appreciate this twist on our now perennial question about whether or not to pursue a graduate degree. As you hinted, my standard advice is do not get a graduate degree, unless there is a specific position or job that is highly desirable to you, for which you have concrete evidence that the particular degree that you are going to get from the particular program where you're going to get it is necessary to get that job or position.

If you don't have that concrete evidence, don't get the graduate degree. That tends to be my stance. I do not believe in exploratory degrees. I do not believe in, well, let me get a degree and see what that opens up. I don't believe in that Washington, D.C. mindset of, well, you need a master's degree to do anything these days. So why don't I just go get a master's degree for a couple years and see what that opens up? No, find a specific thing and get the best degree to get that specific thing. Does it change if the degree is free?

No, not really. Not really. Because the issue with an exploratory degree is the cost, right? It costs something to get that degree, so you want to get a good exchange for the cost. monetary cost is part of that equation, but is not the entire equation. We can get some wisdom on this from Henry David Thoreau. Last week, for example, I published an essay in The New Yorker that really got into some of the economics of Thoreau's Walden. This is a point I also elaborate in my book, Digital Minimalism.

But the point I make is that Walden is often misunderstood. People think it's an ode to simplicity and the beauty of nature. It's not just that. It also brings forth a rather radical economic argument. It says in life we need to do much more careful cost benefit analyses. When we're in an economic production mindset, we only tend to think about monetary cost and just the value of having things. But we should also measure the amount of life required in the exchange to get something. And he gives like an example in Walden, for example, of –

You know, you want to get a wagon. You're a farmer who wants to get a wagon so that when you go to market once a month, it's quicker, right? You can get there quicker with your horse wagon than if you walk and pull something, you save a couple hours. But maybe the cost of that wagon, he says, is you have to work extra acres of land to get the extra revenue to pay off the payments on the wagon. And you're working five or six extra hours a week now to till that land and make the money that helps pay for the wagon. and he says, well, that's five or six hours of your life you had to spend. They get this wagon that's saving you one hour on your walk to market once a month. Not a fair trade.

You can't ignore your life. The opportunity cost of what you could be doing with your time. You cannot ignore that when thinking about the cost of things, and that holds for graduate degrees. It takes a lot of time to get an MBA. It's a lot of your life that has squandered into that particular effort. It could be, especially if you're committed to the deep life, focused on things that are higher value to you into your community, into your soul. So Thoreau would say that's a big cost.

MBA is going to generate a big cost. So there better be a pretty good benefit on the other side before you make that cost. And so we're back to where we started. Now, maybe the benefit doesn't have to be quite as large than if you were sacrificing your time and your money, but you still have to have that benefit. So that's what I would say. I want to see something that's going to materially improve your life in a way that's seems superior to all of the time with your family, with your community, with yourself, with your life, the enjoyment, the awe, the gratitude, the presence, the self-development.

I want to find a material reward in terms of your circumstances, your job, etc., that clearly outweighs what you're going to loss in all of that squandered life when you actually go and pursue the NBA. And if it's there, then go for it. Like, for example, maybe getting that MBA means within your particular government track, it's going to open up a next level of position. and maybe that next level of position is going to be a 40% increase in your salary. And maybe you've done the numbers.

And that 40% increase in your salary is exactly what's going to allow, for example, maybe your partner wants to stay home with the kids. It's really going to change the family dynamic for the better for the next few years. And it makes that possible. And you're going to get six years of this less stress lifestyle. Okay, that might be worth it. Let's say it's what enables you to move from, maybe you're in a far-out excerpt and allows you to kind of move in close to work and live in like an interesting close-in neighborhood. That's the difference that's going to make that happen. And now you're going to get rid of that commute every day for years in the future.

Okay, that might be worth it. Maybe it's going to unlock a particular, a different type of career that is, you know, remote and you can finally go through with your plans. Like, why don't we live in Colorado? And now we can do that. And it's going to be a material positive benefit of your life that you're going to experience every day for years. And great, let's look into that MBA. But if it's just, I don't know why not, I don't think that's good enough. If it's maybe I can get a salary bump, but, you know,

It's 10% salary bomb. Who cares? I could cut 10% from our expenses if we really needed to. It's just kind of nice. Probably not worth it. All right. So I think still keep that same mindset. Be wary of exploratory graduate degrees,

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So to find out more or to order your own sample pack, go to drink element.com. That's drinklminti.com. I also want to talk about Optimize the subscription network founded and run by my good friend Brian Johnson, which is designed to help you live a deeper life. When you subscribe to Optimize, you get access to Brian Johnson's Philosopher's Notes. These are detailed summaries of some of the most important. non-fiction books, the most meaningful and impactful non-fiction books ever written. Fantastic summaries pinned by Brian himself, some of the best book summaries in the business.

You also get every day a plus one video. This is a short video featuring Brian explaining one piece of wisdom from these books. If you like the wisdom, you can just click the link right there and jump to the philosopher notes to get the rest of the details about this books. You also get access to a large library of 101 course. These are video courses featuring experts dissecting some of the key ideas from these books. I did a 101 course for Brian. It's called Digital Minimalism 101. So if you were looking to harness the internet not to keep you from living a deeper life, but to make your life deeper, I suggest looking at Optimize. Now, if you go to Optimize.comize.combe slash deep and use that coupon code deep, you can get not only a 14-day free trial, but also 10% off.

So go to optimize.me slash deep and use that code deep to start making your life deeper with a 14-day free trial and 10% off. All right, returning to our questions now, let's take a call about project selection. Hi, Cal, my name's Danny. I appreciate all your writings and your Deep Questions podcast. Quick question. I really resonate with the idea of selection being very important for productivity. you need to be working on five projects, not trying to work on 50 projects.

I wonder if you have any guidance on that process of selection, how to really hone in on the few things that you should make sure you're giving your deep attention for at least an hour or two every single day. Thank you very much. Well, Danny, I think, first of all, distinguish when it comes to these type of big, endeavors between deep efforts and support efforts.

So deep efforts is where you are you are actually giving the intense high value concentration to move the needle on the project is when you're writing the book that you're actually sitting there writing the book is when you're working on the research paper that you're solving the proof. Support efforts are more logistical. They're smaller. They're necessary to support the deep efforts. But they can be scheduled into the normal.

time block flow of other types of administrative task, right? So maybe there's a lot of preparatory steps before you start doing research for your book. You need to buy some other books. You need to set up some interviews. You need to read through something. Like maybe you have these support steps for the book writing. It's different than the actual I'm concentrated writing. Or for the paper, I got to set up a meeting with my collaborators and I got to download some papers.

Like your support efforts and there's the deep effort. So let's separate those two. Support efforts you can be working on the support effort for many different things at the same time. Again, it's just in your normal flow of administrative tasks. When it comes to deep efforts that require sustained deep work, do them one at a time until you reach a stopping point on one before you move to the next. Two to four total should be active at any one time, no more than that. Because once you're rotating between more than four different things, the rotation is too large. Two to four, I think that's fine.

I mean, two would be great. Most jobs don't necessarily support it. I typically have four things going on because I do the writing and the research. And I usually have a couple of papers I'm really pushing on. But there's usually like two things going on in writing. And then a bunch of support things, a bunch of support activities. I have a bench as well. So in my semester or quarterly plan, you'll see here's my act of things, but here's my bench of things that might be coming up soon or I'm thinking about or I might start doing some support activities for.

So I have those there. So I know what I'm drawing from. I need to swap things in. So that's why I'd recommend. So you have your front bench of two to four things that you're doing one at a time very intensely. You have a backbench of things that are going to come next. And you can do support activities for all of those kind of unrelated to your deep work time, just in your normal flow of task tracking and time block planning.

Right. So, Danny, I hope that you find that useful. All right, let's do one last question here. Let's get a little bit more philosophical and talk values. Hi, Cal. This is Barbara from D.C. I love your podcast. I recently finished the audio book of a world without email, and unfortunately, in my work environment, I'm impotent to change other people, and the book was more of a fantasy

novel for me. I don't really have a question, but more of a request. Can you speak more about establishing your value system that you referenced at the end of episode 103? Great episode, by the way. You only briefly touched on the topic, but it blew the doors off my thinking about priorities and where they should take root. Thank you so much. Really appreciate all of your quality work. Thank you. Well, that was certainly one of the running jokes I had with my publisher when we were working on a world without email. Bookstores decide on their own where they put books on their shelves and the running joke is that a world without email was going to show up on the fantasy shelves more often than the business shelf.

I will say as a quick aside, however, you might not be as impotent as you think. So you might recall from the book that even if you have no control over what other people do, if you just think about your own work life in terms of there are these processes I'm involved with again and again, certain types of work collaborations and coordinations that we do again and again, how can I, looking at just what I can control, reduce the amount of unscheduled messages required to implement that process? And even if you're just focusing on what you can control and not mentioning what you're doing to other people

and not making big Tim Ferriss auto-responder announcements and not preaching, I mean, you should obviously buy copies of my book for everyone. That's a given. But beyond that, just being low-key, just changing how you organize things, how you suggest the people that you get the work done, you can make a big difference. The thing that a lot of people don't have, the piece they're missing when dealing with the email overload issue is what is the solution feel like? And I think we too often think, oh, it's all about habits being better.

I should check my email less. I shouldn't respond quickly. I should change norms. But no, it's all about process reengineering. And process reengineering towards the metric of reducing the unscheduled messages, the number of unscheduled messages you need to receive and respond to for this process to move forward. once you know what it is you're trying to improve, you can improve it a lot. You can't improve it all the way if it's just you, but you can improve it a lot. And if you reduce the number of unscheduled messages you need to respond to by 50%,

without anyone even knowing that you're doing this, that is a significant win. All right, so I just want to put that in there. All right, let's get to your main question. Now, you had no way of knowing this when you submitted this question, but last Thursday in episode 122, I tackle exactly this issue, this question of how do you figure out your values? And I get into a lot of different, a lot of different things you can do to try to seek out and develop your values. I also walk through the way your value should influence your vision, which lives in your strategic or semester plans, and then your vision influence your plan for the semester or quarter. And that plan for the semester or quarter influences your weekly plan, which influences your daily plan, which influences what you're doing right now.

And you get this whole chain that goes from on one extreme, this exploration of the intubstance, of what matters in life to the other extreme, what am I doing right now at my computer? And I lay that out, go back and listen to episode 122. This is a pitch for it. Let me just add one other element here before we bring this episode to a close. Something I didn't mention last time, but I want to emphasize here is that for most people, investigation of what these values are, honing, experimentation, bringing a new input, listing for new information, is really trying to enhance the,

mental schema you have for what matters in life. That should be a tier one activity that gets regular time in a systematic way. And it could be different how you do this depending on the person. For some people, it's a religious question. So it's not just services, but being a part of some sort of religious studies, some Quran study, some Bible studies, some Torah study, what have you. For other people, it's more philosophical. For other people, it's more experiential. I'm doing these activities to require non-trivial sacrifice on my time and attention on behalf of others to try to learn through personal experience what matters.

I think David Brooks, the second mountain, talks a lot about that second, that particular approach there. Whatever the approach is, it's almost like a prescription to give, especially in our current age of nihilism and existential despair and cynicism, where people seek meaning through numbness and emotional highs delivered through digital devices, having a rock solid value system that you are continually evolving and making more sophisticated and mature can be the foundation of stepping outside of that scrum

and finding something more stable and resilient and meaningful. And so I think that's the prescription I would add to all the instructions I gave in episode 122. Add that one. What is the regularly scheduled activity you have, just like you have regularly scheduled exercise? eyes in your life. What is the regularly scheduled activity you have to continue to interrogate what is the

things I think matter most and why? All right. So that's my sermon to end this particular episode. I have to actually log off here in a bit of a hurry because I'm about to give a virtual lecture to a major tech company. So if my body disappears, look at them. That's probably who killed me and hid my body in a swamp somewhere. All right.

So if I survive this talk, I'll see you next week. the new episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.