Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 131: The Elements of the Deep Life

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm hiring! [0:20]DEEP DIVE: The Elements of the Deep Life [3:51]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How should I get started in a new remote work job? [16:56] - How I time block a purely reactive job? [21:56] - Should I bother capturing tasks that are fast to complete? [25:26] - How do I tame multiple concurrent projects? [29:00] - How do I schedule optional deep work in an exhausting job? [31:58]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How much time is left for family after goals and deep work? [38:32] - Is there such a thing as deep fun? [41:20] - I am addicted to my phone. What do I do? [43:24] - How do I make a big life decision when I have lots of options? [49:11]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 131. Quick announcements. I am looking to hire my first employee to help support and grow my fledgling media empire. This would be at first a part-time position, and I am looking for someone in the Washington, D.C. area because they would need to actually come to the Deep Work H.Q on occasion to help action. to help actually work directly with my studio and my equipment. Real quick summary of what I'm looking for. As part of running my media business,

I produce a bunch of content, video, audio, newsletter, etc. So I have to interact with a lot of different contractors who basically help keep all this running, sound engineers, video engineers, IT technicians. And I want someone who can begin to do more of this interaction on my behalf. I also work with a lot of producers for podcasts or for talks or for TV or radio shows. And I want someone who can really help work with those producers on my behalf to get the technical set up proper, et cetera. And finally, I'm looking for someone who might want to get involved in helping to come up with and execute and plan projects that help improve and grow the empire.

As mentioned, this is a part-time job at first to get a feel for it. But there certainly will be room for the proper candidate here to grow in terms. of the hours, the pay, and the scope of the efforts. So keep that in mind. So here's my pitch for why you might be interested in this position, even though it's only part-time at first. It's a chance to work closely with me to see up front. You know, what it's actually like is I'm working on new book projects, as I'm growing

out my portal as I'm expanding this podcast, which has been working its way up the iTunes ranking. So hopefully there is some exciting things going on here that you can be a part of. I think the type of skills that you're going to polish and deploy in this role are skills that are in very high demand right now as the independent media space explodes and you'll get to meet interesting people. I cross paths with lots of interesting producers and writings and media personalities and you would be able to meet them as well. So whether this is just a part-time job and then you move on or this becomes something that expands with the right candidate into a bigger role, I think there's a lot of good opportunities here. All right. So if you're interested, send an email to interesting at calnewport.com expressing your interest and telling me just briefly about you. I would like people that have some sort of background in working with things like audio or video, but even if you don't, if you have the willingness to learn that pretty quickly, I think that's fine as well, but mention that in your email.

I'm going to collect all these emails, the ones that come in, and then I will get back to you with the next step of the actual formal process, where there'll be something more like a formal, a more structured application and we'll move forward from there. But I thought it's best just to say, send me a note, tell me a little bit about you if you're interested. And then I will get back in touch. My only caveat is, ironically, because I have not yet hired for this position, my time is

very limited. So please be patient if there's a bit of a lag before I get back to you with the next steps. These are the types of lags I hope to eliminate as I, I, I, I, build out my team here at the Deep Work HQ. It's a build out my Fledgland Empire. All right, thanks for that. Interesting at Calnewport.com, if you're interested. Let's get started today with a deep dive.

Today's deep dive, I want to talk about the elements of the deep life. The concept of the deep life and that term itself is something I coined very early in the pandemic on my email newsletter. So this probably was April of. of 2020 would have been the first occurrence of me starting to write essays about the deep life and the quest for the deep life. There was something about the pressures of the pandemic that pushed both me and my audience towards this topic. It emerged naturally, but I would say unavoidably once the pandemic began. And it's something I returned to again and again on my newsletter. What is the deep life?

What's it made up of? How do you pursue it? When I started my podcast in that summer of 2020, it became one of the segments from the beginning. From the beginning, it was work questions, technology questions, and questions about the deep life. My very first episode, which was recorded in a rented house that we had in southern Maryland on 60 acres by a river that we retreated to during shelter and place orders in my county in Maryland, the very first episode, which I recorded down there. You can hear the echoes of the terracotta tiles in the. the room where I recorded had a big rant at the end about finding meaning in life. So the deep life

emerged because of the pandemic. As I talked about it, I developed a rough guideline or game plan, we should say, for how one might pursue the deep life. I introduced this notion of buckets, areas that are important in your life. I introduced the convention of naming the buckets that's in an alliterative fashion using Cs. We had constitution and craft and community and contemplation, et cetera. And I had some notions about how you should revisit these and make sure that each of these buckets is being served in your life. And this would be crucial for a deep life. Well, I've been thinking much more intensely and with much more structure on the topic of the deep life recently because I'm thinking about writing a book about it.

I know this is a bit of a side step from what I'm known for with my recent books. I just finished a trilogy of tech and culture books. I'm writing about tech and work culture for the New Yorker regularly at this point. It would be a sidestep. And I'm interested in responding to this once-in-a-generation moment, actually trying to capture for better or for worse, my thoughts on the deep life in a book. It's sort of definitive guide to what I'm thinking about it. So this is something that's been given a lot of thought. And what I've been trying to do recently is reflect on examples of the deep life that I've heard from you, my listeners and my readers or I've encountered and people I know are encouraging.

countered into literature and pull out what are the different elements that show up consistently? What really are the elements that in some combinations seem to be omnipresent when you see life examples of lives that trigger what I call intimations of depth? And that's why I want to go over right now. And I'm doing this in an experimental way. I actually want your feedback. Am I missing something does this sound about right? All right.

So in my thinking, I've come up with what I think are five elements of the deep life, this is a little bit different and more refined than my illiteratively named the buckets. But I somehow think this is a little bit more accurate. And again, the set the stage here, most examples of people living in a way that seems deep has most of these elements there in some sort of combination, typically with one or maybe two of these elements in extreme. So let's go through them. Element number one is escape.

So we see this commonly in examples of the deep life, which is this. escape from your job, escape from where you live, a radical transformation of your context that itself unlocks new depth. So when you see, as I know many people who have done so, let's say move from a city suburb, high traffic stressed out, dual income, high achieving college-oriented schools, to a farm, to 40 acres, to a mountainside in Vermont by the river in Richmond. on a pond in Bostrop, Texas, right? When you see this, I'm radically changing my physical circumstance or radically changing my job. I'm now going to write full time. I'm going to focus on my art. I'm going to a consulting and I'm only working two days a week.

There's this notion of escape that often shows up when you see the deep life. I'm going to radically change my circumstances to unlock radically new configurations of how I spend my time. So escape is often an element of the deep life. Number two, mastery. So by mastery, it's taken a skill, typically professional, but not necessarily professional, and pushing at the higher and higher levels of ability. This comes up common in stories of people who are living deep lives. There's usually an element of impact to this. So the skill is having an impact on the world.

There's usually an element of learning to appreciate the craft for the sake of the craft, the separation from reception to what you produce from the value you get out of doing it. I struggle with this one, but when you see people building a deep life around mastery, you see it. It's the process and the pride and the authenticity of what I create is what matters, even if this one doesn't get a good reception. There's also typically an element of autonomy in it that mastery is then used as leverage to shape a working life in which you have much more control over what your life is like.

This is the classical example I give of the writer. who spend six months a year on their property in western Massachusetts riding in a converted barn. It's the type of thing you can do because your level of achievement in writing is such that you have that sort of flexibility. All right, Element 3, we often see in a deep life discipline. This reminds me a rich role. This reminds me of David Goggins, individuals who push their lives towards very fulfilling levels of depth by embracing some sort of extreme discipline. You should read Rich Rolls book. Rich Roll's memoir is really great on this about how he was in the situation where he had recovered from addiction.

He was an overworked lawyer in L.A. He had recovered from addiction but had replaced the drug and alcohol addiction with food addiction. It was really unhealthy entering his young 40s, overworked lawyer, had trouble walking up the stairs. And something just snapped. And he said, I'm going to start doing. the discipline training required for ultra races. Not marathons, we're talking ultra marathons, 50-mile races, etc. And the book talks about his, I think it's called Finding Ultra.

And the book talks about how committing to this discipline, it completely changed his entire conception of himself and relationship to his world and completely changed his life. I have spent time at Rich Roles House and it is a cool place and he's a cool guy. And that's an example. David Goggins is another example of someone who discipline. Discipline was the foundation on which they transformed their life from one of flailing and dissatisfaction into one of meeting and direction.

All right. So that seems to be often an element. Service. This is probably the Uber element. In other words, if circumstances in your life get to the place where you have almost no ability through exhaustion or sickness or terrible circumstances to do any of the elements of the deep life, There's just one you can pursue. It should be service.

And this is service to community, the friends, the family, to sacrifice and of yourself on behalf of others. I am here to help these people. I am here to help my family. I am here to help these, whatever, at this community center where I work, this notion of connecting with other people and serving people. It's not just, by the way, service in the sense of I am volunteering at a nonprofit or I'm going out of my way to help you when you're down. That's a key part of it. But just forming strong relationships, I think falls under the rubric of service because you're sacrificing your time and attention on behalf of strengthening the connection to someone else. So just taking the time to have that long walk with a friend is also service as well.

So this sort of connection to other people, making other people, your connection to them, your service to them being a core element of your life shows up often in some of the deepest examples of the deep life. All right, two more. we're at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So number 6, appreciation. You see this a lot. The appreciation of quality. Becoming a cinephile and really enjoying film in a very deep way. Becoming an onophile and really enjoying wine in a very deep way.

Becoming a bibliophile and really enjoying books in a really deep way and collecting them and understanding literature. There is great depth that comes from appreciating things. things deeply. And then the final, perhaps, most complex piece of the deep life that often comes up is awe. This ability to see yourself as part of a grander scheme emmeshed in a mystery that has meaning beyond just you and your egocentric concerns. Religion is very good at offering this. There's a lot of people who find a lot of depth in religion, in particular the religious practices that help unlock this. understanding and experience with these otherwise mystical intimation. Some people try to get here through meditation. Other people like the transcendentalist of the 19th century American Northeast would get this out of encounters with nature.

But this notion of awe also seems to come up often in the deep life. All right. So that's my list. This is my refined list. Escape, Mastery, Discipline, Service, Appreciation, and Ah. And my claim is that in seeking the deep life, each of these needs to be present to some degree. one or two of them need to be something that's pursued with to an extreme degree. And that somehow is the recipe.

You make a recipe for your deep life by making sure each of those elements is there and serviced. And then you choose one or two to make the main ingredient. You choose escape and say, I am moving to the woods. You choose service and say, I'm really going to, you know, pull back on work, move to a town that's much more community oriented and get deeply involved in the lives of people around. me. You get really into you're the surgeon, into the mastery that I'm going to master in great satisfaction out of mastering this new technique that's going to save lives, etc. Okay.

So this is my refined theory of the elements of the deep life, my refined theory of their application that all should be there, but one or two really emphasized. Let me know your thoughts. Interesting at calnewport.com. Again, because I'm thinking about writing a book on this topic, feedback right now is really welcome. All right. that's it for the deep dive. We have a good collection of questions. Before we dive into those

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Let's get started with our first deep work question, and it comes from Alex. Alex asks, what advice do you have for someone about to start their first remote work job? Well, Alex, I think the key idea here is to treat the job as if it was an old-fashioned in-person office job. What I mean about that, think about having a morning and afternoon commute at a fixed time. do something for that commute to phase shift your mental context away from home or personal life into work life. So go for a walk on a set route, go to a coffee shop to get your first cup of coffee. Maybe you go there and you read the newspaper and then when you come back, you're able to start

your day. Do the same thing at the end of your day after your shutdown routine and you should be doing a shutdown routine. You go for a walk or you go back to that coffee shop. Maybe now you're having a adult beverage instead of a coffee or you go. through a hike through the woods or what have you to clear your head like you would normally accomplish with a commute in an old-fashioned office job. I think that is important. Once you are actually in your day for the remote work job, then time block plan, okay,

have a structure to your day, here's my meetings, here's what I'm doing in between, if I'm going to take a break, here's what I'm going to take a break. Time block planning. So in other words, intentional deployment of your time during the day is more important at home than in the office because at home, there are many more things pulling at your attention. So if you are approaching your schedule from a haphazard fashion, from a what do I want to work on next, you are going to get pulled more often into non-work-related distractions. You're going to casually start doing that laundry. You're going to turn on Netflix while eating lunch at your couch and fall down a rabbit hole there.

So you need more structure because there's more things pulling at you. and in the absence of structure, you're going to get successfully pulled away from work more quickly. Now, of course, if you're exhausted, schedule breaks, but be very clear about the breaks. I'm going to go watch this show on my outside porch, etc. The final piece of advice I would give you, and this is going back to a piece I wrote for the New Yorker,

I believe in the summer, this summer, that was called Thinking Outside the Home. And the argument it made is that if you are working remotely, do not assume this means you're working from your home. A lot of issues working from your home. I really recommend in that circumstance if it is at all possible, instead working from near home, a workspace that is separated from your home that is used only for work. The psychological advantages of this are massive. This could be leasing an office.

This could be a co-working space. This could be you convert a shed in your backyard. There is new startups I've seen emerging for example. example, including one I believe is called Gable, in which there's basically an Airbnb situation for these types of offices where people nearby who have nice accessory buildings or basement offices can rent them the people to come work at so you're not in your own home. This is so important that I would be willing to spend a non-trivial amount of money on it. The returns you're going to get, I think, are going to be worth it.

So how much money? well, let's give a specific number here. And again, this depends on, you know, how much you get paid, for example. But in the building where my deep work HQ is, there have been, for example, single offices available for lease right around the $500 a month mark. Now, that's probably hitting you as huge sticker shock. Like $500 a month is a lot. But I would almost just adjust that out of my salary if you're, you know, your take home pay

is whatever it is, or let's say your gross pay is $7,000 a month or something. So like a non-entry level job, but not necessarily like a super high paying job. To take off that Epsilon, $500 a month, and just imagine that that pays a little bit less, but you get to go to an office and work, I think, is worth it. Keep in mind in most circumstances that office lease is deductible in full. So you can take another 30% off of that cost. Don't think about it as you would think about, let's say, paying for a cable bill or a gym and say that's a very expensive cable bill or that's a very expensive gym.

Instead, think of it as just part of your salary adjustment. Like, okay, instead of paying me $7,000 a month, they're paying me $6,500 a month, but also supplying an office. I know for a lot of people, that's untenable, but I just want you to give a really careful look at, is there any way? What can I shift? What can I change in my spending? What can I change in my habits?

It makes it possible for me to be in an office. and if it is all possible, go for it. I know it's not possible for a lot of people, but I also think there's a lot of people for which it would be possible. They're just not thinking, they're not thinking of it as a priority. And I think more people who can afford it should think about that as a priority. All right, so Alex, good luck with that new position. Our next question comes from Jesse.

Jesse explains, I am an IT engineer at a medium to small managed service provider. where I believe the average engineer is fairly overwhelmed with the amount of tickets we receive, leaving us scrambling to make our SLA. I usually batch my time blocks with multiple tickets in mind. I also never schedule anything in the first 90 minutes of my day. This time is reserved for administrative tasks as well as neglected tickets, but at the same time, all the engineers at our service desk are in rotation for priority issues where we have to drop everything to work on a customer being in a downstate.

How can I succeed with time blocking in this situation? Well, Jesse, the goal of time blocking is intention to make sure that you are deploying the time you have available to work with intention. Because if you do not have intention, here's the time available. Let me actually take a beat to think about what's the best way to deploy this time. You're likely to end up using that time in a more haphazard fashion. It's going to be a lot less optimal that you're going to go down rabbit holes or spend time on lower priority things or not fit. in things in the small windows where they could get done because you're just web surfing during those windows.

So intention is really important. If you're an IT engineer whose job is mainly ticket-based, in some sense, you already have an intentional structure to your day that the ticketing system is giving you that structure. Unlike the standard knowledge worker where you have an inbox and a Slack channel and a calendar and it's just rock and roll and figure stuff out, you actually have a lot more structure. You have a service level agreement. You have an SLA. You're supposed to deal with a certain number of tickets at a certain level of quality.

You're supposed to be on rotation for emergency. Customers are down tickets to deal with, right? That actually is a lot of structure and intention to your day. I'm working on this ticket now. Now I'm working on that ticket. So I don't think actually you need to be in the situation time blocking every minute of your day. There is another source of intentional structure for that day. Now, when you're doing ticketing, of course, the key is sequentiality one at a time.

Your brain is going to work Beth when you work on one thing until a stopping point and then move on to the next. Do not concurrently handle tickets. Move one to the stopping point before you grab the next. Ticketing systems actually support the sequentiality pretty well, so that's good, but just keep that in mind. The only caveat I'm going to give you here is that there are some things you need to do that aren't dealing with tickets. Give those things blocks. And these are really the only blocks in your schedule. And what you have to do is figure out how can I block the administrative work that's not ticket-based in a way that those blocks will be reasonably protected?

First thing in the morning might get you there. Having some sort of agreement with your team, this is the 90 minutes every day when I'm doing non-ticket work. So I'm not on the rotation for the emergencies during that period. And maybe we should all sit down and talk about this and say, what's everyone's 90-minute admin block? let's scatter those so that we're not all at the same time so we can still have rotations for dealing with emergencies but it doesn't impinge on this time. Maybe have this conversation,

but you want to have administrative work that's not ticketing blocked in a way that's protected. And that's really the only blocks you have to worry about. So in some sense, you're in a lucky position. Your work is a lot more structured than the rest of us. Block the stuff that's not structured that remains and otherwise, one at a time, execute, get things done. Our next question comes from Patrick.

Patrick asks, what you do when capturing something is about the same amount of time as getting it done. Well, Patrick David Allen has some standard advice here, which is if you can do it in less than five minutes, sometimes the number is three minutes, just do it. Don't go through the whole processing capture process that he talks about. I nuanced this advice. I say it depends what block you are currently in. If you're in an administrative block anyways and you come across something, so let's say you're going through your email inbox and an administrative block and you come across something that you can't just immediately answer,

but you could solve the problem in a couple minutes. You've got to look something up or send a file or some such. Send your availability, right? Yeah, just do it. You're in administrative mode. Why capture it and try to bring it back later in that mode? just get it done. If you're in an administrative block and something comes in across the transom, you know, someone calls you or stops by your office and, hey, what about this? Can you do this?

Yeah, just do it. You're in an administrative mode. I agree. If it, if it's something can be done quick, just get it done. If you are not, however, in an administrative block and something comes to your attention, so let's say you're working on something deep and you have to pull some information from an email. And you see another email that has arrived that could be dispatched just a couple minutes, leave it. Do not switch your cognitive context. You can deal with that later in an administrative block. Now, let's say you're in a deep block, some sort of deep work block, for example, and something

comes onto your transept that's not in your inbox, so that there's not a record from it unless you capture it. Like someone sticks their head in the door and says, hey, can you send me your teaching preferences for the fall or something like this? I still say don't do it then capture and move on. Now, I think the key here is maybe not do a full capture where it gets its own card on the appropriate column and a Trello board with annotation. Do a lightweight capture that you can then get to it later, process it later in more detail. The lightest way capture is just to jot down a note if you have a notepad you use for capture or jot down a note in a working memory.txte file.

So if like me you keep a text file open on your computer that you use and reference all day long and completely go through at the end of the day when you shut down, you could just type really quickly some notes there. Regardless of what's being asked, you can put a placeholder there that will take you 15 seconds to write down. Course scheduling, whatever. Dot, dot, dot, dot. And then when you get to your next admin block, you're checking out your capture list, your working memory. txte file, then you can deal with that. All right. So that's my advice.

When doing administrative work, if it's quick to get done, just do it. when doing not administrative work, don't do it. Then if you need a placeholder, put down a very lightweight placeholder very quickly in some sort of capture surface you see often and keep going on with whatever you're still in the mode of doing. And the whole reason behind this is you don't want to initiate an entire context shift. The duration of an event does not matter. It is the neuronal distance, roughly speaking, of the cognitive context in which that new event exists that matter. So if I have to shift out of paper writing mode to scheduling mode to think about my semester coming up, that's a big cognitive context shift I have initiated. That is going to have

a cost, even if the time I spend in that new context is brief. We have a question here from Suzanne. Suzanne says, I'm an executive search consultant. At any one time I am working on 12 or more searches. Each one is a distinct project. I have not found a reliable system to stay on top of each project in as proactive way as I would like. I've had no disasters, but I'm constantly feeling overwhelmed and like things are out of control. How would you go about managing this many projects simultaneously? Suzanne, well, you need a system. You need a system that is pretty regimented and lockstep for how you deal with these projects,

how you keep track of the status of these projects, and what you do in each of the steps of each of these projects. With that much concurrent work, you cannot come at this in an ad hoc fashion. You cannot come at this with, let me just see what emails come in and try to remember to send some emails out and throw Zoom meeting links on people's calendars and just hope it all works out. You have to be incredibly structured here for this type of work. You've got to think of yourself like you're building automobiles and need to piece together the optimal way to run that assembly line. Now, I don't know much about executive searching, so I cannot give you detailed, suggestions here. But I can tell you more generally this will take some work. It will take some refining. But what you want is step one, step two, step three. And each step, here's the

information, for example, that has to be gathered. The communication channels through which it's gathered, what I have to do before the step is over. The information for each search is stored in a structured way. You have a command module, a command center where you can see, virtually speaking, the status of all of your ongoing searches and what step you are in. You've structured your day in such a way that whatever, the first 90 minutes is all about whatever proactive emailing is required, you know, for stages 2, 7 and 17 or whatever. That's when you do it. And then you have this afternoon as for doing the actual calls.

And you have a scheduling system set up so that it's very easy to schedule these calls. You probably need to hire some sort of virtual or part-time assistant if possible to help organize all of this mess. I mean, you've got to be structured, structured, structured. If you're going to run that many concurrent projects with that many moving parts. You could look at a book like Work the System. That might give you some advice, though,

that the type of work being systematized there is probably a little bit more wrote than what you were working on. The E-MyMith Revisited. That's another book you might look at. This is really for entrepreneurs, and it talks about how entrepreneurs should try to systematize their work more. But seeing yourself like an entrepreneur that's trying to get outside of your business a little bit, the structure and systematize what happens in your business,

even if you can't hire anyone else, is a useful mindset, but overall, this is my big message to use, and don't give up on trying to find a system. You need to be much more committed to that goal. I want this to be incredibly regimented. The only way to keep that level of concurrency with projects of this level of complexity actually functioning properly. All right, let's do one more work question.

This one comes from a doctor named Ruth. Ruth says I work as a National Health Service General Practitioner in the UK. And my three clinic-based days each week consist of almost 100% deep work for 10 hours a day. I typically have a minimum of 34 patient contacts per day, either as telephone or face-to-face consultation. This patient-facing work is deeply immersive and clinically challenging. I am doing what I believe to be deep work for the entire day. The problem is that on the other two days of the work week, I still have a lot I want to achieve, but it is very tempting to fill the days with shallow work to compensate for the long work days.

There's a few things to say here. First of all, you have to trust how you feel. If, as would be reasonable, these 10-hour deep work days are exhausting you mentally, then no, you do not have much left in the tank for doing additional deep work. 30 hours of actual intense deep work is a lot. If you were in a private practice, let's say here in the U.S. and not forced to a NHS schedule that you can't alter, I would say make less money and give yourself more downtime.

It's a tradeoff that's worth it. Now, you probably don't have that option in the NHS in the UK. So we just have to acknowledge you are doing a lot of deep work more than probably most people can do. So what should we do with those two non-clinical days? Number one, reduce your hours on those days. Don't work 10 hour days on those days. Don't work eight hour days on those days.

Work something like five hour days on those days so that your week actually adds up to a standard 40-hour week. So maybe start your day a little bit late, end it early, and really lean into that extra time to recharge. Administrative work that needs to get done. Yeah, that should be the focus. I would try to automate that as much as possible, be as efficient as possible so that a couple hours each of those days

is enough most weeks to stay on top of that. And then with the time that remains, okay, if you have other deep pursuits, a research paper you want to write, a new system, you want to research that you might want to bring into your practice, now you have a little bit of time, maybe two or three hours each of those days, that you can surround by breaks and go for a walk and relax and do it fresh on your own terms and end it on your own terms, some weeks but not others. That's what I would recommend. The bigger picture point here is I am, as you know, an advocate of not trying to fill every hour of a contrived work week or workday schedule with effort.

Do a really good effort that moves the needle. Stay on top of the stuff that you need to stay on top of the keep the lights on. Beyond that, be flexible and seasonable and take breaks and give yourself rhythms of hard days and easy days. go to the movies in the afternoon on a Tuesday sometimes. I think that is critical for long-time sustainability, and it will not change one iota the value that you were providing to the NHS to your patients or more generally to your company, to your employer, etc. So I'm a big believer in a lot more flexibility in how we approach each day.

This is a great case study of that general idea. All right, that's what I got for deep work questions today. Let's do a quick visit with some of our sponsors, and we'll move on with some questions about the deep life. I want to take a moment to talk about Element, L-M-N-T. This is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means lots of salt, but no sugar. Element contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of 1,000 milligrams sodium, 200 milligrams, potassium, 60 milligrams magnesium,

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deep work ritual. The Lions Main and Shaga mushroom give it a unique physiological footprint when you drink it. So I drink it before deep work. My mind over time makes the connection. Oh, when I feel that four-sigmatic mushroom coffee feeling, it's time to do deep work. and it helps me switch more consistently into that mindset every time. We've worked out an exclusive offer with 4Sigmatic on their best-selling mushroom coffee. It's just for my listeners. You can get up the 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles, but to claim this deal, you must go to 4Sigmatic.com slash deep.

This offer is only for deep questions, listeners. It's not available on their regular website. You'll save up the 40% and get free shipping if you go right now. to F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep. All right, let's do some deep life questions. We'll start with a question from Tierra who says, how much time is left for family if one is focused on goals and deep work? I think this is an important question because it gets to a conception that is common,

but I think is slightly mistaken. So implicit in this question is that if we're talking about something like goals, if we're talking about something like deep work, what we're talking about is something that is above and beyond your normal work day. That if you begin to think about how to add more of these priorities to your life, more time than what otherwise be taken has to come out of your family life. I don't think that is a good trade. I don't recommend that trade. Let's start with this clear distinction that most people have between their workday and non-work day. You have your work hours, you have your non-work hours, your work hours. If you have kids, you have some sort of child care range, your non-work hours, you are with your family. You figure out whatever's reasonable there the best you can make that,

dependent on your circumstances, but this is the way typically things are set up. You're at work and you're not at work. What you then do with your time in work? Well, that's when saying trying to keep a better ratio of deep to shallow work hours is very important. Don't spend your whole work day just doing shallow work. It might feel busy in the moment and important in the moment, but you're not moving the needle. This is where organization matters. If you're doing daily, weekly, quarterly planning, then you're going to make more use of those hours every day than if you're just coming at it reactively,

automating things. So things that are urgent, like they have to happen, but they don't really require a lot of concentration. Automating these or systematizing these. They take up less time. That is important. So it lowers the footprint. But this is all about how to take these hours you have already set aside for work. and get the most out of those hours.

So, Tierra, when you see it that way, I don't see the fundamental conflict. Now, if you're working too many hours, this is a different issue. Now, sometimes that's something you can control. If you have some autonomy, you can pull back in those hours, either by reducing the scope of what you take on or getting more efficient about what you do so it doesn't take up so much time. Some situations, of course, you don't have control over how much time things take. let's say you work for the federal government here in D.C.

And the eight-hour day is one that you think is too long. You'd rather spend more time at home. There's not much you can do about it. The federal government says this is what our hours are. If you work for us, this is what it's going to be. But what I'm trying to really say here is let us not think about organization, prioritization, depth versus shallowness as somehow being about adding extra hours. It's not.

It's about more of the time that you are already and have already. already been putting aside for work. Now, we have a semi-related question here from ALAP who says, is there such a thing as deep fun? Well, Alap, I don't, I don't like to over-apply the word deep to too many things. I do apply it to deep life and deep work, but when it comes to time outside of work, the term I'm more likely to use is the term I introduced in my book, Digital Minimalism, and that is the term high quality leisure.

And yes, I think high quality leisure is important. A better way to think about it is being very intentional about your time outside of work. Don't just seek escape through technology. Let me let my phone or the streaming services on my TV numb me. Don't just seek escape through chemicals. Let me just eat this junk food. Let me just drink this large number of drinks. Instead be somewhat intentional.

about what matters to me in life outside of work. How do I, to the extent possible, build my time outside of work to promote these things? It's going to make your life seem much deeper. It's going to seem more meaningful. It's going to become much more resilient. It's going to become much more satisfying. So you think about your family and community and service to friends and family, and how do I make time for that? You think about appreciation, the things that you have come to really understand really well and you really appreciate it.

You're a centophile. So you appreciate going to the local arts theater to see the next movie. There's a discipline component to this. I'm training my body. I'm picking up a hard skill. I've gotten really into bow hunting and I'm doing my target shooting. Having that intention and structure about what you do outside of work, I think is critical to living a deep life. I want to call it deep fun.

I would just call it deep living that includes high quality leisure, but also commitments to the other elements of a deep life. So that's the way to think about it. Don't just wing it outside of work. Think through what I want to be doing with this time. and come up with a reasonable and sustainable allocation of those hours to support those things that you care about. Our next question here is from James. James says, I am a millennial who is addicted to my phone and checking my phone.

How can I start chipping away at this addiction using ways to require as little willpower as possible? Well, James, the short answer here, the somewhat cynical answer is by my book, digital minimalism, the book is about that. It's all of my thoughts on that. All of my takes on why it's so hard to get away from your phone and what's really required to break that connection. But if we want the short version of that answer, which I'll give you right now, I would say do not think about this as something you were going to solve with hacks and habits. You're not going to chip away at this problem by adjusting your notifications, by putting in a place rules about bringing your phone into your bedroom. by changing your password from Instagram to something that's more difficult to try to slow you down.

This phone in your life is probably filling a real void, an existential void of I don't want to confront myself or what I'm doing in my life or what's hard or what is potentially great that I'm not doing. I just want the soothing of here is something that's pressing some buttons and I can just escape from all of this. That is an important purpose that the phone is serving. If you want to break that connection, you have to fill that void yourself. You just try to wrench the phone out of your life. It is going to be psychically disruptive and you're not going to succeed. If you say, I'm just going to not look at my phone anymore. What happens then when you confront that void you're trying to escape?

Terror. Be it a full-fledged sense of terror or a sublimated, addictive urge to grab that phone again, but you're not going to make progress. You have to fill that void. before you get rid of the thing right now that is filling it for you. Now, how you do that, and this is the prescription of digital minimalism, is, well, reflection and experimentation. You have to get back in touch with James and yourself and what you feel bad about and what you feel good about and where you think you're falling short and where you're proud of it and what you want for your life and where you're falling short from that.

You need to build yourself up an aspirational image of where you want to go and the confidence that you can get there. You need to begin enumerating. Here are the things that matter to me and how I want to spend my time. This is an inventory you do of yourself. And once you have figured out, this is what I want to be. This is what I want to spend my time on. This is what I want to make of my life. Then and only then you can ask and answer the question, how does technology best serve this vision?

Then you go through these optional personal technologies that are capturing so much of your attention right now and say, which of these are really needed to support this vision. And is there better options for supporting this vision? And you really go out there and you enumerate them. I'm going to use this service in this way. I'm an artist. I'm going to keep Instagram to post my pictures and to look at these 10 artists I like. But that's my only use of Instagram and I'll do it on my computer and I'll do it just once a week. I need this Facebook group because this is where my bike team organizes their rides.

But I'm going to take Facebook off my phone. I'm going to unfollow everyone so that when I go right to my right to the page for this Facebook group, I don't see any news feed. I just get the information I need what's going on. I've been chatting with these people on Twitter, but we're going to set up our own Discord server, and we're going to have twice a week we get together to have a conversation because I don't really need all of the other amygdala priming functions of Twitter in my life. So you figure out what you want to do in your life,

what tech can help that, and how specifically you want to use that tech to help it. And then you make the answers to that question be the technological life you proceed with going forward. That, again, is much more likely to succeed that instead looking at what you don't like right now and saying, let me just do that less. Now, again, the reason why this works is that you're filling that void by doing the hard work through experimentation reflection of figuring out at least a tentative answer to the question of what am I all about?

What do I want to be doing with my life? Where am I falling short? Where do I want to be? You're filling that void. It's not so terrifying to be alone with yourself anymore because you have this aspirational vision you feel good about. Your technological choices are then supporting this vision. and that's what makes them likely to be sustainable.

Because now when you get that knee-jerk urge, let me just go load up Twitter and start scrolling and see if I can see something there that presses some buttons and makes me feel some things. The argument is not should I do this or not. It is, do I no longer believe in this vision I have of what I want my life to be that's so powerful that does not include Twitter in it? And you're like, no, I love this vision. It does include Twitter. So no, I'm not going to use Twitter. On the other hand, if you've done none of that work, and instead you just say, I use Twitter too much, I should use it less. The argument is, okay, I know I should use it less, but is it really that important that I don't use it right now?

And your mind says, no, I'm tired, so let's do it. And that's an argument you're much more likely to lose. So, James, the solution to your phone addiction is the work not on your techno habits, but the work on yourself. Then let tech serve yourself in a very intentional way. and you look back at the habits, the addictive habits you have now, just like the recovered substance addict that have turned their life around, looks back at the late night drinking that they used to do and say, that has no place in my current life that's so important to me.

You will feel the same way about the tool. So forget the tips and the hacks and I'm going to, you know, not use Instagram at night and I'm going to try to use less Twitter. Forget that, right? You're not fixing a broken appliance. you're fixing your actual life, the tech issues will follow much naturally once you do that. All right.

It's not an episode of the Deep Questions podcast without at least one sermon slash rant. So James, thanks for affording me that opportunity. Let's do one more question here. This one comes from Fernando. Fernando asks, How do you make a big life decision when there are so many choices available? I want to move to a different state or country, but I'm not sure which one is better.

I believe both will take me closer to my future dream life, but I feel overwhelmed by the number of options there are career choices I can make as a 23-year-old or even when it is the right time to make a move such as starting a business. So, Fernando, here's what I'm going to recommend. Take the different elements of the deep life. Now, again, you go back to my deep dive,

you'll see that I used to refer to these as buckets with alliterative names. I am now trying out these six elements of the deep life that aren't alliterative. And let's see if I can remember these offhand. Escape, mastery, discipline, service, appreciation, awe. If you believe that these really are the elements of a deep life, go through these.

And honestly, I would spend some time, I would spend some time with each of these. You want to become familiar with what these things mean to you and how they integrate into your life and your situation. So really what I would spend time doing first is put a keystone habit in place for each of those six areas, something you do on a regular basis that you track in your metric tracking space of your time block planner and your notebook or wherever you keep track of these things.

It's not trivial, but it's tractable enough that it's sustainable. Just to begin laying a foundation of these are six areas, if you believe in those areas. And by the way, you can change that list. It's just the list I'm going with now. These areas you think are important for your deep life, I'm regularly investing time to support each of them. start to get some knowledge out of this

by doing a little bit of awe each day, by doing a little bit more disciplined, by having escape. And what does escape mean on a small scale? Well, maybe it's having a moment in your schedule every week or every day where you escape and you go down to the stream just to spend 30 minutes and the meditator read or whatever it is. You start to learn a little bit about your relation to each of these elements.

Then give a month for each of these. So we're talking about a six-month process here where you're going to go through each of these. and spend a month just reflecting on that particular element. See if there's any change you can make to your life that more substantially integrates that element into your life. This is where you might actually have to start making some changes. And in particular, quitting or eliminating time-consuming shallow pursuits that are getting in the way of some of these more important things. You might do some more serious changes where you join something or commit to something or you quit some other things or you shift your job to or reduce hours,

temporarily while you're during this process, whatever it is, one month per each of the elements you've identified as being important to your deep life, spend some time with it reflecting and making some non-trivial changes to integrate that into your life. All right. Now, after you've done this, your life's going to be much better already, but you're gaining self-knowledge because you are interacting with each of these elements on a daily basis in a substantial way. And there's a lot of self-insight you can gain. Now you can begin figuring out, okay, in the deep life, the new iteration of my life that I want to transition to as a young man here, what is the mix of these ingredients I want? Like, is there one or two of these I want to really put as a main ingredient? Is escape critical to me? Is it mastery?

Is it really going all in on service or awe? Because now you have some knowledge about this. You've spent time reflecting and acting on each of these elements in your life for months now. So you have good self-knowledge and figure out, okay, which of these do I want? want to rebuild my deep life around. And then to what degree do I want these other elements in my life? It's almost like you have, if you're using six of these in my example, six volume faders and you're trying to figure out what are the different levels of volume I want for each of these that's going to be the right mix for me. And that's a recipe. That's your recipe based

off self-knowledge. Now you're ready to start thinking about big transformation. Now you can ask the question, okay, what are different configurations for my life, including where I live and what I do for a living and what other things I've integrated into my life, look at different configurations that are going to hit that recipe. The things you have turned all the way up, they have a lot of it going into the recipe that it centers on that. The things are in there a little bit lower. It's still integrated.

iterate through a lot of different configurations of your life, be very creative in this process, and be willing to consider even very radical options. Sometimes it's the most radical options that hits your recipe just right. Sometimes it's not radical at all. You're actually maybe 80% there. You just have to change this job to here and move over here and quit this and boom, you're there. Sometimes it's radical. Sometimes it's not, but you know what you're trying to hit.

You find a configuration for your life that's going to hit it. Now, this might be, some of this will be changes you make right away. Some of this will be things you have to accomplish or cultivate to hit the recipe. Like, okay, I got to build up this skill. I got to, you know, build, make enough money to move here because it's more expensive. Like, okay, so this might not be immediate. But you can lay out a path to how you get to that configuration. that's going to hit this recipe, and then you execute.

So what I'm saying, Fernando, is don't just fly from your gut. You have this intimation that you want a transformation to a deeper life. It is a strong intimation. You are not likely to succeed by just allowing that to push you into some sort of drastic action because just the drasticness of the action feels like you're doing something. Let's be systematic. Let's have structured transformation. And this is the way I think you need to do it.

know the elements of the deep life, you get used to the elements of the deep life, you learn through experience your relationship to that elements of the deep life, you figure out what mix of these, at what levels, what magnitudes, what relative magnitudes is best fit for you, then you find a configuration that matches it. Whether it be, now I'm going to move to an island and live very cheaply in shape surfboards most of the day, and or it's, I'm moving into the city and I'm going to build this business into this, you know, mega whatever, and and I'm going to be a triathlete at the same time. Whatever you end up with, you're getting somewhere with intention and not just trying to hope that drastic changes in what you do will lead to drastic improvements and how you feel.

So I hope you'll excuse me being what I'm often accused of, which is being too systematic about things that are somewhat philosophical or subjective. But I think it is useful sometimes to have that frame. So Fernando, you got time. Keep going. Don't give up. But take the steady route. and then let me know what you decide and how it goes. And with that, where I need to go is to an appointment I'm late too.

So I'm going to wrap up this week's episode. Thanks for all the questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.