Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 128: LISTENER CALLS: The Art of "No"

Episode Date: September 9, 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.OPENING: My new reading habit [6:53]LISTENER CALLS: - Retaining information from books. [11:16] - The value of an agile personal productivity system. [18:33] - An impractical vision for a highly productive building. [26:16] - Marketing a course without social media. [37:45] - The art of "no". [43:14]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 show is brought to in part by Blinkist. As I always say, in our current culture, ideas are power, and the source of the best ideas are books. The problem is, how do you figure out which books are worth reading? It takes time to invest in a book. Which one should you read? Well, this is where the Blinkist app comes in. Blinkist takes top nonfiction books, pulls out the key takeaways, and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks. that you can learn from in just 15 minutes.

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Or let's say you're like me. You see some books that people are talking about and you want to know if it's worth buying. Like I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari and maybe I want to read Homo Deos or in or 21st Lessons for the 21st Century. Well, I can go right onto my blink app right now. I see there are popular blinks for both of those books. Get the 15 minute summary and answer that question of do I have enough here or should I dive in deeper and buy that book? So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. And that's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkist.com slash deep. This podcast is also brought to you by ExpressVPN.

Now, the way a VPN works, of course, is that you form a secure connection to a VPN server. That server then talks to the Internet on your behalf. So the Internet is just talking to that server. They don't know where you are or who you are. Now, there are many advantages to using a VPN service like ExpressVPN, but one in particular that's pretty cool is that there are services like Netflix, which show you different content depending on where you are in the world.

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expressvpn.com slash deep and you will get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 128. This is a listener calls mini episode so I will be answering questions submitted by my listeners. We got a good group here. We got some questions on book retention. adapting agile methodologies, your personal productivity, building productive buildings,

promoting your work without social media, and the difficulty of saying no, when you can't actually get the work done that you are tempted to promise. So it's a good group of questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to figure out how you too can submit a listener calls for these weekly listener calls, many episodes. Quick administrative note, this episode has four advertisements instead of three. Quick peek behind a curtains here. My goal is to keep my episodes to each having three ads, each ad under two minutes,

meaning somewhere between five to six total minutes of ad reads for the episodes, which run from 45 minutes to 90 minutes long. That seems to be the industry standard and not too much in the way. Occasionally there's a mistake with an ad or an ad read which creates something called a make good, where I have to repeat an ad later. It creates a fourth ad. So my apologies for the fourth ad, that's one more ad than I would normally put into a listener calls many episodes, but that's the technical explanation for why that's happening.

Before we get to the questions, I wanted to talk briefly about a personal habit that I've been experimenting with that I've been finding some success with. So I thought I would share some notes. Starting in May, I decided to add a little bit more structure to my reading habits. And I shifted from a quantity of chapters per day approach to reading to a quantity of books per month approach. So I set the limit, perhaps ambitiously, at five books per month. And since May, every month I have read at least five books or completed five books. If you want to know the technicalities, if I begin a book in one month and finish it to next, the month in which I finished it gets to credit.

So I've mainly done five books a month, some months in there. I have read six books. I have to say, I really have been enjoying this particular habit. I was a little bit worried that if there was too much of a pressure on myself, you've got to get your numbers. You've got to get the reading done. That it would somehow strip the reading of its intrinsic enjoyment or create a sense of grinding through books. That's not really what's happening.

I think the impact this quota system has is that I more consistently and insistently look for times to read. So I'm often reading, for example, pretty early in the morning while waiting for my kids to wake up. I'll read at night more often now after I put my kids to bed more often to read during lunch certainly this summer I found myself bringing books to let's say like my son's little league game so in between innings when nothing was going on I could get some more reading in there that I'll sometimes bring it with me to work so it's just you

you begin to see your day through the lens of where can I fit in some reading now instead of feeling pushed I feel motivated. I like making progress in books. I like finishing books. But most importantly, I like the actual books themselves. I have forgotten the pleasures of actually getting through a book.

I'm primarily reading nonfiction, but usually one or two novels per month as well. Just getting through a book. It's a conversation. This is how I have been experiencing it. It's a conversation with an interesting person. Not every moment of that conversation is going to be scintillating, but when you go out, and have a drink or a coffee with an interesting person who's in town, you usually come away saying that was good. I learned a lot. It was interesting to meet another person. It was

stimulating. This was great. I'm glad I did it. And when you're pushing through books again and again faster, faster, it's like you're having a lot of these conversations. And if anything, the stakes around the books reduces, I have been rating my library a lot, going back in finding books I had bought but not yet read, and I'm going through those. I'm reading random old books that have no real reason to, but because, hey, I'm already reading five this month and five the next month and five the month after that. Why not read this random Scribner and Sons essay book from the 1950s? Might as well. And so it's changed my relationship back to something much more positive with reading. And I don't mean to imply that I have not had a

positive relationship with reading. I obviously do a lot of it for my job. but it has become a part of my life in these last, whatever it's been now five months, in a way that maybe it was diminished some during the pandemic before that. So I'm just going to throw that out there. Something to experiment with. If you want reading to come back to be an important part of your life, consider working backwards from a monthly goal.

Whatever goal seems reasonable to you and see what happens. See if that motivation of, look, I want to hit my number, so why don't I read now instead of doing something else? instead of pulling out my phone, let me do another chapter of this book. Let me stretch and read an extra 30 pages here because now I'm getting close, and I'm getting close to taking this off of my list. Let that motivation arise and then see how your relationship matures with books as this experiment goes on. You begin to see them as interesting conversations with interesting people,

and soon reading might become more a part of your life. Anyways, five months in, I'm really enjoying this particular experiment, so I thought I would share it with you. but that's enough about me. Let's get into your questions, and I thought it would be appropriate to start with a question about reading. Hi, Cal, my name is Gretchen, and I'm a speech pathologist at a hospital in Arizona. First, thank you so much for your work. Your books, podcast discussions, and blog posts are a huge inspiration to me.

I'd like to ask your thoughts about retaining the information we read, especially with regard to nonfiction. So in recent years, I've increased the number of books I read each year, which I love, but I struggle to retain a lot of the information I read beyond like vague impressions and ideas. I've experimented with the slipbox method for improved retention, but I wonder if I'm missing some other opportunities. Well, I think first of all, we have to define what we mean by retention in this answer. Now, if by retention you mean keeping more information at your fingertips. So you remember it in your brain and without having to consult other notes, you're able to bring it up more quickly. well, I don't think this should really be the goal of your reading habit.

If you're reading a large number of books, some for pleasure, some for interest, some professionally, you're not going to be able to keep most of that information easily accessible. And it would be unrealistic to think that you could. So I'm going to assume when you say retention, you mean retaining the information in a form that it is efficiently retrievable as needed. That the ideas you encountered in this particular book are not going to be lost to the sand, of memory a few weeks later, they'll be stored in some type of system that if you need that idea in the future, you can go back and say, what did I learn from that book and pull it out and use it?

I think here you have two options. Let's call them lightweight and heavyweight. The heavyweight option is probably more or less the type of thing you're doing. Slipbox is an English translation of Zytelcastin. We've talked about the Zytelcastin family of note-taking methods before on this podcast. It's a way of taking notes that cross-linked to each other and build up a complicated map of associations and information that you can then follow to retrieve information.

There's a lot of people who have done tutorials on these. So there's one form in particular that Shreeny Rao talked about when he was joining me on the podcast to answer some questions a couple weeks ago. And if you go back to the episode with Shreeny, you can find where we talk about how he uses a Zytel-Cast-inspired system for his reading notes. It was pretty interesting. He basically, and I'm summarizing,

so go listen to the whole episode. He would basically create notes in this online note-taking software he was using. He would create notes for each of the big ideas in the books that he was reading. And then he could link those notes.

First of all, he'd have a page for the book. It would link to all the notes in that page. But the notes could link to other notes if he thought it was related to something else. And over time, and this would create these complex webs of information. The interesting thing he talked to me about was he sees creating those notes, which

is I call heavyweight because it takes time. He sees creating those notes as being central to his creative process as a writer. So he no longer follows an approach of how many words do I want to write each day and instead says how many notes do I want to process into my system each day. Create a page for it, summarize it, make some appropriate links. because he's realizing that creating these notes, summarizing ideas from things he's been reading recently and connecting them to other ideas is actually a thinking process.

He's building out this artificial memory with these ideas, and then later when it comes time to write, he has all of these ideas connected to each other. What he needs is there in that web of ideas. So I think that's kind of a cool idea. It's a little bit romanticizing writing. This is an issue with the Zytelcastin proponents, is they often try to make it seem as if once you have this beautiful web of ideas,

then the actual work of producing crafted presentation of ideas is greatly simplified because you just have these great connections and original ideas, and people point to these academics to supposedly write hundreds of papers a year because they're just drawing out there's idle cast and web. And there is some truth to that. And in the world of writing, we can look, for example, to Ryan Holiday, who is very prolific. He has his 12th book coming out this month, I believe. uses a Zettel cast an inspired

method on physical note cards. He builds out these note cards that each have individual stories or ideas from the books he reads and they're categorized carefully. So when it comes time to write a book, the first step is pulling out a good collection of note cards and then saying, great, I will now translate those into

the chapters of the book. So there is some truth to this, but for the most part, writing something hard and original, you're going to draw from the ideas you've captured, but I have to do a lot of original thinking to make those connections for that article. most people are not in a situation where the articles you're writing is just going to reward a interesting association that pre-exist.

Usually I'm trying to make this particular argument, make a take on this contemporary point. What do I know is relevant? There's a lot of think you still have to do. All right. It's a long way of saying Zytokast-inspired methods are interesting. They take a lot of time. They have some really cool benefits. They don't probably have the big benefit to this proponent's claim, which is that you're

basically front-loading the... thinking and the production of creative artifacts becomes easy. Lightweight is what I tend to do. As I'm reading, if there's a passage or definition or idea on a page that I think is interesting that I want to retain for later use, I put a slash across the corner of that page with a pencil, and then bracket or checkmark the thing or things on the page that I want to point out. Occasionally, I'll also jot down, I'll jot down a quick note about it.

There's some other notation I'll use. There's an exclamation point for surprising or... shoulder shrugging like what is this this is weird this upsets me this is interesting and stars for oh this is a great point to illustrate something i've been thinking about it i think is really well put so what you have then is a bunch of pages with the corner slashed and check marks brackets and weird symbols on some of those pages and then i just put the book away i talked about in the opening of today's episode that i'm now reading five books a week i mean a month i should say and i mark up everyone and what i what i will remember about a book what you can

trust your brain to remember is, oh, I read a book about a relevant topic that I vaguely remember had some relevant points. That's about what your mind will remember. With my lightweight method, you can then pull that book off the shelf, rifle through the pages, finding the ones that are marked, hone in on just what's checked on those pages. Again, it takes about five minutes to go through and review the major points of an entire book using this method. And you can quickly find those things again, and then you can pull them out if you need to use them for a particular project. You know, If I'm writing an article, I might go back, pull out things, put them into Scrivener and a research page so that I can then use it in my article writing. So that's the lightweight method.

For now, I still largely use that lightweight method. The Zytokester methods are interesting to me. I think they should be interesting to people who think for a living. But it is a lot of overhead. So if you're not getting a ton of benefit or if you find the friction is slowing down how much you read, you might want to consider giving the lightweight methods a spin. All right, let's do a question here about getting pretty hard core with your productivity setups. Hi, Cal. My name is Tiawash.

I'm a senior software engineer working in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. My job involves mentoring individuals and also guiding them to become better engineers. I've just recently become interested in the topic of productivity and was really inspired by the statement you said regarding finding the right mindset instead of finding the right tool. Since then, I've started time blocking and I hope I can keep it up and get good results from it. On my journey of finding the right system that works for me in my personal life, I noticed a lot of advice on planning and reviewing that looks very similar to agile frameworks such as Scrum and Comban. My question from you is that do you think getting inspired by those methodologies and frameworks to create a system and adopt their practices and ritual is a good idea or not.

Well, here's the thing. If you're looking at a methodology like scrum or con bond, these are widely used in software development. And we've talked about on the show. I've talked about them a lot in my writing. I've talked about in my New Yorker pieces. I've talked about them in a world without email. And there's a lot to recommend them.

In particular, what I like about these agile methodologies is that it makes the work that needs to be done transparent. Everyone can see it. Everyone can see its status. And there's a systematic way of coordinating with others to decide who should be working on what next. So it's a much more transparent and structured approach to work identification and assignment than what most people do, which is we're just slinging slack and emails back and forth. These to-do list exist implicitly spread informally over dozens of emails clogging up our inboxes. And we just all bother each other trying to steal time and attention from each other.

and hope enough stuff gets done. So I like that aspect, that structure and transparency of Agile methods. The knock against Agile methods is because they're popular with software developers and us tech types are obsessive geeks. People tend to get very obsessive in their implementation. So they go beyond the main insights.

Here's where the tasks are. We have this daily meeting. Here's how we assign tasks. Here's our principles. And we get really obsessive. We have names and roles and their scrum masters. trying to pass out their scrum points on the full moon, but you have to roll a 2D20 to see if you get enough hit point damage

to move the card from one column to the other. We'd love to get obsessively detailed about things. And I have certainly heard this, especially from non-tech shops that have tried to adopt scrum or tried to adopt con bond, is that it can get so fiddly and detailed-oriented that it becomes overwhelming. So my worry is that if you build a personal productivity system

off of Agile or Conbon, and you are in a software development context like you are, that you're going to get too fiddly, that you're going to get too detail-oriented. And when it comes to personal productivity, what does that mean? That means you succumb to the allure of productivity prong.

PR0 in. All right, so you may have heard me talk about productivity prong before. If you want a primer, you can look at my New Yorker piece titled The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done, where I really get into it. Pran, by the way, it's elite speak, so it's a sort of geek lingo term,

but basically it means this obsessive pursuit of a technologically boosted productivity system where the perfect deployment of technology takes out the friction and hard work of work. And there was a period,

the first decade of the 2000s in particular comes to mind, there was this period in which productivity prong was very alluring, especially to tech types, where we thought if we could just get our quick silver macros right. If we could get our kinkless GTD setup humming. If we could get our personal con bond system with just the right colored index post-it note so that we could get a quick post-mortem of the ratio of works,

the different types that we're doing. If we can get that just right, work is going to become pulling the widget lever. The system tells us what to do next. Here's what you need to do it. We do it without barely having to think about it, repeat, low effort, high efficiency, see great work gets done. All right, it turns out this doesn't work. I mean, you know my 20% role. My 20% role is the difference between a bad productivity system and a good, the best possible productivity system is going to be your work gets 20% easier. That's not for nothing. I mean,

20% drag, 20% extra drag might slow down the rate at which you produce or push you over the edge towards burnout, but hard work, if you make it 20% easier, still hard. Riders sometimes think of this as the Scrivener effect. I love Scrivener. It makes a lot of things easier if you're writing, but writing is still really hard. It's nice not to have that extra 20% of having to wrangle with research notes and try to have

different parts of a word document that you wish you could just look at one at a time and composition mode is great. This is all great, but it makes things 20% easier. You still, in the end, have to actually stare at a blank page and write, and it's hard. And so that was the problem with productivity prong is that you can't get away from work being hard.

You can just make it a little bit less bad. So if you start building some fiddly system with agile base or con bond just for yourself. It could be fine. I just think don't put too much attention towards it. Figure out the basics of what you're trying to do.

I want full capture. I don't want to keep things in my mind. I want to be intentional about how I do my time each day. And I want to be able to get a good sense of what's the whole landscape on my task so I can make some good decisions about them. There's some pretty simple ways to do this. I mean, you have task boards or task systems to store things. You do weekly plans and where you review.

these things, you have time blocking to be careful about your daily time. I mean, that's basically probably all you need. Adding more details after that, more rules, more systems, more rolling of 2D20s to try to figure out what to do next, it's not really going to give you a big difference and the friction might itself become a problem.

So this is all just a warning. Productivity systems are necessary, but they are not sufficient for doing good work. So figure out what you need out of the system. get some good, flexible, low friction solutions that give you those properties and you're going to stick with them,

and then move on to actually focusing on doing the work. Because the work is still going to be the work, no matter how fiddly your system actually gets. All right, well, we talked about productivity systems there. Let's see if we can shift our focus within the context of productivity from systems to actual whole buildings. Hi, Cal. My name is Josh, and I work in a real business. research center. We are thinking about building a new building sometime in the next few years. What advice would you give us so that we can build something that contributes to deep work?

Thanks. Well, Josh, I have a practical answer and a highly aspirational impractical answer. Sort of in a perfect world, if we could do anything and had unlimited space and money, what would I do? So let me start with the practical answer. the scheme I identify for productive architecture in deep work, I believe that's the book I talk about this, is a hub and spoke model. So the hub and spoke model is that you have these hubs

where people can gather, work together, run into each other, relax, have the type of serendipity that we often hear about when we hear from people about how to design creative spaces. But separate from that hub should be spoke. places where individuals or small groups of people can go to work without distraction. So offices with doors with ample whiteboards or projection screens with capture or computer screens or whatever tools you use for your collaboration. You can go and be quiet and be undistracted.

This seems to come up a lot if you look at the history of buildings in which large innovation was produced. They were neither open plans like we see today nor were they just warrants of closed offices as well, hub and spoke seems to be the right balance. This was, for example, the setup of the famed Murray Hill Bell Labs. When they were designing this campus, their initial instinct was let's do it like a college campus. You have different buildings for different disciplines. We'll have a physics building for the physicists.

We'll have a math building for the mathematicians. We'll have an engineering building for the engineers. Their big insight was, let's not do that. Let's have one giant building where all of these. different disciplines are going to be together. Now, what they didn't do was say, let's have a giant airplane hangar-sized room, and everyone can work in the same room at shared tables, and therefore by some sort of serendipitous osmosis will get innovations like the transistor.

That's not what happened. Instead, what they did is they said, let's have, of course, offices, because the physicists need to sit there and look at the whiteboards and try to solve, you know, whatever the equation is with just a couple of them, and the mathematicians need to sit there. and think about information theory. Of course, I'm identifying Claude Shannon's work at Bell Labs here, basically by themselves.

So let's give them offices with doors, standard. But let's put these offices on a very long shared hallway that leads to a very large shared cafeteria. And it was hub and spoke, and that worked pretty well. When you needed to work hard on something, when you needed to leverage the advantage of undistracted, thought you would close your door. And when you were looking for serendipers,

you would have your door open and also you would see people in the hallway and you would run in the people in the cafeteria and there's a lot of interesting documentations of really interesting interdisciplinary groups that would gather at these dining room tables and you got lots of innovations. I mean, you don't get Claude Shannon's information theory if he wasn't also running into telephone engineer types that have been working on issues of noise in the telephone lines and had been working on that problem for a long time. So if you look at, for example, Robert Hamings famed speech, you and your research and he talks about his time, and he talks about his time. at Bell Labs. He talks about you need to have your door open, but sometimes you need to have your door closed. What he was really getting at was this nicely, this nicely carefully titrated balance between deep work and serendipitous interaction, collaboration and idea generation.

So that's the practical answer. Hub and spoke. Not a fully open office. Not everyone stuck away in their own Warren. And if you're a research center for sure, you don't want everyone remote. I mean, yes, that gives you access to more talent, but you're getting rid of the hub portion

altogether. And that's not going to help support the spokes if there's no hub to generate those ideas. All right. So what's my wildly impractical solution? I would have different spaces for different types of work. And in particular, there would be a space I go as someone as a researcher who worked at your research lab. Here is the communication center. And this could be open plan or not open plan or a bunch of little alcobs or whatever with computers hooked up to the internet and you come and you log in with your name and like when I need to do email, go to the communication hub, when I need to do research, let's say I want to go to the internet. Maybe there's another hub for that.

Here's computers hooked up to the internet and lots of books and there's a librarian, like some reference librarian type people here to help you find information. You can go gather lots of information. And, okay, in my wildly impractical dream, everyone has these virtual wallets. this can be the network or could be on a USB key where you find all these information, you grab all these articles from the internet and digital books

and the reference librarians are helping you and you put them all in your digital filing cabinet or wallet or onto your USB key. Now you have that. And then you have a separate space with separate rooms for actual deep work. And if you need information,

you bring it, pull out of your wallet and you can load it onto these big machines where you can do your thinking, your computer coding, your mathematical equations, and you have individual rooms and small group rooms where people can get together, but you don't do email there.

That's in a communication hub. And you don't go on the internet there and look for articles and stuff. You do that in the reference library, you know, the knowledge hub, which has cool lighting and old wood paneling so it puts you in that right mindset. When you're doing deep work, you do deep work. And then you kind of make your plan for the day. In fact, maybe everyone should have a time block plan, and those time block plans are in the main gathering room,

where you have these big gathering rooms where you're not doing any of those things. You hang out, there's coffee machines there, and you hang out, and there's whiteboards, and you can chat, and there's food there and alcoves and tables where you can eat. And in there is this big board where everyone has their time block schedule for the day, and so the meetings they have to do are on there, and there's office hours, or when you know they're going to just be in the hub, and you can chat with them, and you can grab it. And then there's, like, their deep work time, whatever. So everyone sees what everyone else is doing, and all of your operations are separated. This would require a lot of space and it would create some rough edges that would themselves metaphorically tear

some organizational fabric here but people would be happier and produce a lot more because the brain is doing one thing at a time when it's communicating, it's communicating, when it's researching, it's researching, when it's thinking deeply, it's thinking deeply, it will do all three of those things better. It will do it more efficiently,

it'll produce more value, and the human will be a lot less frustrated and exhausted because their brain is not trying to jump back and forth between all these things. It would also have the side bit benefit of let us make clear and transparent how much junk is being put on the heads of our researchers because they can't all just mix this together. I'm just in my desk at a computer. So HR and all these other people send me requests and I kind of have to answer request and do

things. It all just gets mixed together and who knows we're all just working. It's like, no, I have to do the administrative work or what have you. I have to go do that over in the communication hub. And if I'm in the communication hub all day, people will, you know, we see that and say, well, this is not good. You're a researcher. We want you to spend half your day, at least this deep work hub what's going on, right? It makes these dynamics transparent. This is a brain that we want to mainly be thinking and producing value and occasionally, you know, doing research to help support that value and then relaxing in between and taking breaks in the break room. We can like look at it. Maybe we track, put aside privacy concerns. In my perfect world,

we don't care about privacy concerns because there's a, there's a perfect boss that's, you know, never going to have used data. We can track and say, why is this person having to spend so much time the communication of. There's a problem. It makes that transparent. So look, I don't know if that's the best way to do this, but I'd like this type of idea, this notion that we want to plug people into these multipurpose machines that handles everything from submitting parking paperwork to the recording of the

deepest, highest value thoughts and everything in between. And we just sit there and do all of this. This flipping back and forth between windows and simultaneously run programs in the exact same space in the exact same room is a cognitive nightmare. It is not the right way to get value out of human brains. Just like if you say, what's the right way to build a car? You look at a car factory and say, we should spread out where different

things happen. That's more efficient. We shouldn't just have a guy by a chassis that tries to do everything right there. We should have a separate guy to do the transmission. And over there at the other part of the factory, that's where we'll put on the steering wheels. We need a cognitive equivalent of that. Space can help drive that.

So again, wildly impractical, the pragmatic thing is hub and spokes. Make sure both those things are represented. impractical. I think we should get a lot more creative, but that's probably work for someone who is better at thinking about things like architecture than I am. But if you build that building, let me know I'll come visit. Let's take a quick break to talk about another one of our sponsors for Sigmatic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. 4-Sigmatic mushroom coffee is real organic, fair trade, single origin,

Arabica coffee with lion's main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. Now, it's a good tasting cup of coffee. The caffeine's a little bit lower than other, so it doesn't make you as jittery. The mushrooms give it a nutty taste, almost like a smoothness you would get from a creamer without having to have the creamer. But what I particularly like about 4-Sigmatic mushroom coffee is that those mushrooms additives give it a unique physiological signature.

So my habit is to drink this coffee before deep work sessions. Over time, my mind has learned that unique physiological signature means it's time to do deep work and it shifts over into that mode. It is my psychological hook to get my mind into the right mindset for thinking hard. Now, again, there's a million ways to use this coffee, a million reasons why you should. that just happens to be how I deploy it. Now, I've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee, but this is just for Deep Questions listeners.

You can get up to 40% off and free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, but to claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep. This offer is only for DeepQuestions listeners and is not available on their regular website. You'll save up to 40% and get free shipping. to go right now to 4Sigmatic.com and fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. This episode is also brought to you by PolicyGenius. Summer's coming to an end.

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Their team will look into ways to save you even more. bundling home and auto policies if they find a better rate than what you're paying now, they'll switch you over for free. So head to policygenius.com to get started right now. PolicyGenius, when it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. All right, return to the show here. Let's do a quick social media question. Hello, my name is John Nordell, and I'm a visual and digital arts professor.

During the pandemic, I started teaching some Zentangle drawing workshops via Eventbrite online. And it worked out really well. It's a relaxing method of drawing. It helped people all over the world. And I want to keep going with that. But how, without using social media, do I get the word out about this course, these workshops that I'm offering? Well, John, I think you have two avenues forward here. The first avenue is do you use social media to spread the word?

Remember, as digital minimalist, what we're trying to do is figure out what's important to us, then find those big swing applications of technology that help those things. And because we then know why we're using the technology we use, we can put some pretty careful fences around it so that they don't have too many negative externalities. So this is a good instance of that. You are an artist. You have an Instagram profile, which I looked up, that, as you might expect for an artist, has a lot of posts dedicated to artwork.

And I didn't look close enough. I don't know if this is your artwork or you're highlighting other people's artwork, but this is common for artist Instagram. It's a visual social media network. People follow who are in that community, follow various artists to see their latest work, for example. And I think it's completely reason. for you to have a social media habit where you have a schedule by which you post the certain types of artworks or commentary on art. I think it's important to have a schedule.

It should be fairly regular so people can expect it. This could have nothing to do with you spending time on social media. This is five minutes a week. You know, Mondays when you post it, you go on your computer. Instagram's not on your phone and you upload or scan the latest artwork and you drop. and you drop it into Instagram with the explanation and that's it. Yeah, there's stuff you could do. You can engage with people in comments,

but the benefits they are negligible and not worth the time suck and distraction that that would probably have, right? So it's five minutes a week. You do that and you're maintaining 80% of the value of your Instagram account, and yes, announce when you have a course. I'm doing an event invite course. It's a good use. You have an audience on there that's interested in what you're doing.

They might be interested in the course. This is not going to have a large negative footprint. It's a good digital minimalist style use of the technology. Now, you may have other reasons why you don't want to use it. Maybe you have philosophical issues with Mark Zuckerberg and don't want to support him by using Instagram. There's other negative things about the company that you don't want to be associated with. Or maybe you have an internet addictive personality type. And you just find out really hard to just post on there.

If you know it's there, if you know the account's there, you're going to go down rabbit holes. you know it's not good for you. Okay. In that instance, you say, well, how am I going to get the word out about this course? Well, you basically have to ask, what would me 10 years ago do? Because the Internet was around, courses were around, artists were around, but use of these platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook had it yet passed that critical barrier where it became assumed. I really think about 2012 as a key tipping point where you began to actually see these not as technology. used by some for some purposes,

but as a assumed use technology. Like in the late 90s, where suddenly www.com showed up everywhere. It didn't become an adjunct, a way that some people could get information about a company. It was just assumed that everyone had access to websites and that as a company or a product or a service,

you could point people towards a website to find out about you, instead of a phone number, for example. Well, 2012 is roughly when that began, that happened for social media. So like, 10 years ago, you would not have promoted it on social media and say, what would artists, what did artists use to do there? I don't know. I mean, look, I don't know the answer because I'm not an artist.

The point is those answers are probably still at least partially valid. There's still as partially ways that you reach other people who are interested in that, other ways of doing promotion and publicity of ads at art schools or colleges. Or I don't know how it works. I'm just saying there was answers to that question. People did these things before heavy social media use was assumed. And a lot of those solutions are at least still partially. around. So it's up to you the way you do it. The only thing we want to avoid here

is I have a very specific need for using social media and I am going to allow that very specific need to justify unrestricted brain colonizing overuse of these tools. Because I want to post one piece of artwork per

week and once every few months announce a course I'm going to spend three hours a day on Instagram and I'm going to be fighting with you know my artist's friends about COVID vaccinations. that's what we want to avoid and there's a lot of ways to avoid it so john i liked your artwork i checked it out i think that course sounds cool keep at it whether you use social media or not i'm not going to be mad at you either way just make sure that you're whatever you do you were doing it with

some care and intention all right let's get a little bit more psychological here maybe a little more philosophical and deal with what i think is the core issue one of the most unresolvable issues with preventing overload, which is the difficulty of saying no. Hi, Cal, my name's Steve. I work in finance for startups. My productivity issue is I can't communicate the message. I can't get that work done by then. It seems to be at the heart of all my productivity issues.

Have you any advice as to how to best communicate that message? I really struggle to get it across. Well, this is a good question because it's a huge problem. You note that this is fundamental to your productivity issues. I think this is the case for lots of people. Now, the week before this episode came out, I published my latest essay for The New Yorker that was titled, Why Do We Work Too Much? And I try to get at this question from an interesting angle. And the first thing you have to do when you talk about overload is you have to segment the population of working people and say, what segment am I talking about?

because the reason why different segments have various workloads really differs depending on the segment. And it's actually one of the things I dislike about a lot of the coverage of overload, which is a great issue. I'm glad it's being covered and a lot of smart people are writing about it. One of the things I dislike is the degree to which these different segments will be casually intertwined and it complicates the picture of what's going on and how do we solve it. the issue of if you're a non-unionized warehouse worker and you have a crushing workload,

that is a different issue than a highly autonomous high-level knowledge worker who finds that, like in your situation, you've just said yes to too many things and you have to stay up late to catch up with your emails. In both cases, we're talking about overload, but the dynamics are different and we shouldn't mix them together. So let's focus on your segment, the segment of what we'll call autonomous or semi-autonomous knowledge workers. So your non-entry level office creative job where there's not a very clear work order. Okay, here is your goals for this week and you've been given a work order that you have to execute in order to get paid. It's much more, you know, there's a lot of people asking you to do things. You say yes to some no to some others.

Some you have a choice, but it's a false choice. You have to say yes. And there's a lot of autonomy or you're an entrepreneur type. You run your own company or you're a freelancer. And so you have a lot of say. No one is saying here is your. the six things you have to do today. Okay, if you're in this segment,

what I observed in the New Yorker article is that we tend to work about 20% too much. We don't work ourselves to death that often. I actually worked up the, I looked up those statistics. In Japan, the term is Karoshi. This is death by overwork. The stress of too much work being the primary cause of your death.

And it doesn't happen that often. They actually measure it and classify it. And it happens 100, 130 times a year. tragedies. But there's millions of people working in that population. So, okay, we typically don't just work until we die, but we also typically aren't facing a reasonable workload. How rare is it to find someone at a sort of non-entry level, autonomous, creative job, or knowledge work job, or an entrepreneur that says to you, yeah, I have more than enough time to get what I need to get done. Not a big source of stress. I'm not busy. You rarely see that. You only see that among

lifestyle entrepreneurs that are specifically trying to build their entire professional life around that goal. So I pointed out in that New Yorker article, a book I really enjoy, Paul Jarvis's 2019 book Company of One. And it's like a handbook for building an entrepreneurial company where instead of growth, you focus on lifestyle. But it's pretty rare. And the people who do this do this specifically to get that goal.

Most of us work 20% too much. It's sustainable, but it sucks. All right. So why is that? Well, here's what's interesting. Clearly, we say no to things. Clearly, we limit our workloads because we don't work 50% too much. We don't work until Karoshi.

And it's not the case that in every one of these knowledge work environments or entrepreneurial environments, the amount of work being put on your plate just happens to be exactly 20% more than you have time to handle. No, we are regulating our workload to that roughly 20% mark. If you said yes to everything, you would fill up every waking hour and you would eventually die, right? So we have way more work that we can handle. We implicitly triage it. We tend to end up in that roughly 20% too much area. Why is that the place we end up in?

Is that the maximal productivity? Is that the place where we get the most out of the human brain? That's what we're operating at peak efficiency and that's what it needs to really grow the economy and to get after it and to crush it? No. My argument in that New Yorker essay is we end up at 20% too much because in the absence of any clear structure or etiquette or rules or allocation systems for work assignment in these contexts, the heuristic we default to is when my stress is sufficiently high, I feel like I have psychological cover to start saying no. And when does your stress get sufficiently high to give you that psychological cover when you

have about 20% too much on your plate? So we self-regulate to this really bad equilibrium point. Why am I making this point here is because it means you say no all the time. You're just not saying it quite enough. So I want to get you out of the mindset of I can't say no. You are turning things down all the time. That's why you're at 20% too much, but not death by overwork. You say no.

But you need to say no 20% more. And the thing is that 20% is not that big of a deal when it comes to the overall amount of value that you produce for your team. That 20% extra, well, first of all, it's lower quality because you're overworked and stressed out and your context shifting more and you're trying to dash things out late at night to try to just get them off your plate. lower quality work. So the difference between someone who says no, just enough more to get it down to a reasonable load versus someone who says no after they're 20% overworked, that 20% difference is not going to be super notable in your output, but your life is going to be much, much better in the reasonable workload scenario. So you do say no. You just need to say it a little bit more. Okay, so how do we do this? Well, we have to stop using stress as our heuristic for. Now I have

psychological cover to say no. And replace it with other here. he's how I keep track of what a reasonable workload is. I'm going to get after the stuff you give me. I'm going to do it really well. I'm going to be well organized. I'm not going to be frivolous with my time. I'm not going to have effort and energy wasted to unnecessary friction tracking things down. I'm going to have all the information where I need it.

I'm going to work without context shifting. I'm going to time block my day. So things are getting attention one at a time. But I know what's reasonable and I don't do beyond that. And yet feel scary in the moment because you're like, I can't start saying no to people, but again, you are saying no. You're just saying it 20% later. We're just going to start saying it earlier by replacing the stress heuristic with a more reasonable heuristic.

And how do you do that? I mean, okay, it gets a little complicated. Time block planning is probably your foundation because now you get a really clear understanding of how much time things take and how much you're actually able to get done. So if you time block plan for a couple weeks, now you have a pretty reasonable sense of like what can I fit? Okay, now add on top of that time block planning the other two scales, weekly and quarterly planning. So now you're really getting to know this dynamic. When I put on this goal at the quarterly level, like how many weeks do I actually have time to make progress on it? And how much time does it take?

And so what is a reasonable amount of projects of this size for me to actually execute successfully? And what's already on my plate right now? And you get this much more rich and detailed sense of what you can do, how much time things take. And then you have to just trust it. say yes to fill up a reasonable workload, crush that work, do it really well, full non-context switching deep work if you need to be very organized about the non-deep work, so the footprint is small, the temporal footprint is small, and trust that the quality of that execution is going to earn you the respect of your colleagues and earn you the cover, to use Adam

Grant's term, the idiosyncrancy credits needed to maybe say no at a slightly higher rate. I don't even know, by the way, if people are going to notice you're saying no at a slightly higher rate because, again, we're talking about the difference between 120% too much work and 100% right amount of work. So that's what I suggest. What we all need to do is just need to get clear about what's a reasonable amount of work and then just lean into it. If you couple that with, you know, producing really well, but if you also couple that with you can depend on me. If I say I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. I deliver it when I say I'm going to deliver it because I'm weekly planning. I'm quarterly planning.

I'm time block planning. Nothing gets lost. There's full capture underneath it. I did Cal 7 productivity baby steps from his prior episode, all of this stuff, I think you'll earn to write to say no at a slightly higher rate. I really do. We trust this guy.

He says no on some things. When he says yes, it gets done, it gets done at a high level of quality. Things don't get forgotten. He's more organized than we are. He seems to have his act together more than we do. So we trust him when he says,

that's too much. Here's where I am. There's no more time in Q1 for this. That could be a Q2 project, but we already have these coming up. you will have that control. But again, when I come back to again is these two high-level billboard font size points. Number one, you are already saying no to lots of things.

You need to say no a little bit more. No one will notice you're saying no a little bit more, but to your life will be much better. And two, if you really are being accurate and smart and responsible about your work decisions and crafting a workload that you can actually handle and you're killing it, you're doing it really well, you never drop the ball, even if people do notice that you're saying no slightly more, you will absolutely be able to get away from it.

And if you can't, if the culture is somehow, for whatever reason, we want you being 20 or 30% overloaded or we don't think you're actually working or we don't think you're actually busy, that's the equivalent of working in a factory where there lacks on the safety. And there's a non-trivial chance that you're going to lose a finger

because they don't have the right guards up, you know, or they don't keep the machinery picked a, you know, put together right. That's a bad factory. You might not have the ability to quit today because you need to pay your bills, but you better start looking at if the factories down the road or other factories are hiring. And now is a good time to be doing that because people are desperate for talent and the talent has a lot of leverage right now because of pandemic disruption. So don't tolerate this is just what work has to be, 20 or 30 percent overloaded.

All right. So that's a bit of a rant, but it's only because I've been thinking about these. a lot because I was working on that New Yorker piece for a while. So hopefully you find that useful and you are able to say no just a little bit more. Because sometimes that little bit more is all we need to make work from something that's grinding into a real source of satisfaction. And I will be satisfied to wrap up this episode now. Thank you for everyone who submitted their listener calls. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you too can submit your own calls for the show.

I'll be back on Monday with a full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast, and until then, as always, stay deep.