Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 133: How Do I Defeat Distraction?

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Is the Desire to Produce Negative? [5:14]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - What are the most popular workflows used to escape excessive email? [17:07] - How do I read academic papers effectively? [27:40] - How much studying is enough for a college student? [31:38] - How do I defeat the allure of distraction? (Plus: Why Soto should get more MVP votes than Harper) [35:17] - Is it too inefficient to copy a time block schedule into Outlook? [36:51] - Are the processes from A World Without Email productivity pr0n? [38:59]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Why do you (Cal) not pursue FIRE? [42:52] - How do you avoid confirmation bias? [49:50] - Should I use TikTok because that's where people are? [54:07] - Is deep work a philosophy? [55:26]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.

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That's optimize. Dot me slash deep and use that coupon code deep for a 14 day free trial and 10% off. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 133. Now, I don't know if this is just me, but whenever I record that intro to the show, the I'm Cal Newport, I can't help but think about that episode of Parks and Recreation from season three

when Leslie is running against Paul Rudd's character Bobby Newport for Pawnee City Council and they're trying to record an attack ad and they all take turns trying to record the phrase Bobby Newport in the deepest, most menacing sounding tone. Bobby Newport. I got to say it is still jarring whenever I see those. episodes to hear my last name, even though it has something to do with me. It's just my mind is attuned to my last name. So I have to imagine if you have a very common last name, this must be something that catches you all the time, because it really is arresting when you hear your

name on TV. All right, enough of that. I wanted to quickly touch base on a topic that I mentioned in a recent episode. I was talking about selecting books to read. And I said one technique to reduce the pressure on selecting a new book is to just read a lot more. If you're reading a lot more, then you're just constantly grabbing assorted, random, interesting in the moment style books because the stakes are much lower. I'm going to finish this book in three or four days anyways. Doesn't really matter. And then when you come across books, you're really excited to read. You read them. But not every selection has to be so fraught. And so I mentioned that I've been I've been doing five books a month as my reading challenge this last spring and summer. And it has really,

reduce the pressure. One of the questions, though, that people have asked in follow-up is how do you find the time to read five or six books a month? And the short answer is you make reading your default activity. Default instead of crucially looking at your phone and secondary instead of, let's say, watching streaming services to unwind or this or that, it just becomes your default activity. So if I'm up before my kids are up, I'm reading. If I'm eating. If I'm eating. lunch, I'm reading. If I'm at one of my kids' little league practices, I'm reading or a little league game and it hasn't got started yet or it's in between innings.

I'm reading. In bed at night, I'm reading. During the reading sessions we now have put in place to try to help teach our kids that reading is power, I'm reading. I think we underestimate the amount of time we go to our phone as I'm just bored, I'm tired, I want to relax, want to be distracted. You replace that with reading, five, six books a month suddenly are getting read. So that's the answer to the question of where to find the time.

I have to say, I think this month I have pushed this idea of when you're reading more, you don't have to care so much about what you read. I push that to an extreme this month because I hit my fifth book. I completed my fifth book for September right around September 20th. And so what I'd like to do in those cases is get a really long book to start because I count books in the month I finish them. So I go let me grab a long book that, you know, I have this found time, these extra 10 days, so I can really get into a long book and finish it in October

and it can be my first October book. For some reason, I ended up finding a used intro to film studies textbook. 600 pages long. It's not a lot of theory. It's just, okay, let's talk about editing. Here is the history of editing. You know, here's how we used to do it. Griffith introduced this.

This is what happened when sound came in. Here's the different terminologies. Here's different philosophies. Different directors had. Here's some screenshots with some explanation. Okay, boom, let's move on to color. And so on. It's just information dump into your brain, 600 pages.

So that's about as random as it gets. There's very few people who, if you're reading many fewer books, say the book I really think I want to get into is an old film studies textbook. But when you're reading a bunch of books, why not? And you know what? This book ends with a 100-page. synthesis of Citizen Kane where it puts to use everything you've learned in the 500 pages before to break down Citizen Kane from all different angles.

And I haven't seen that movie. So I'm going to finish this book and I'm going to watch the movie and I'm going to have a whole new appreciation for it. So a cool project. But this is the extreme. This is the extreme you get to when you're reading more books is that you really can take a chance on almost anything without it being too high stakes. So I will let you know how that goes.

I'm about 270 pages into that textbook. So I still have a ways to go, but I think I will make it by early October, as is my plan. All right. Anyways, we got a good show today. Deep work questions. Deep life questions. We'll get into both. Before we do so, though, I wanted to do a quick deep dive.

The specific question I want to dive into is the following. Is the desire to produce negative? Now, this is picking up a thread that I have been weaving off and on through the deep dives of the last few months, a thread that is looking at the current anti-productivity movement. I've really been trying to engage with this movement constructively, not dismissively but constructively because I think there are some really good observations in this movement. So I'm trying to nuance the arguments of the anti-productivity movement to understand what's really interesting and important here. And where is it that maybe they're getting something wrong? I think this dialectical approach is going to help us in general have a deeper insight on this subtle issue of productivity production organization and the humanist drive for a life well lived. So here's the angle from the anti-productivity movement I want to look at in isolation today.

which is this idea that the drive to do productive activity outside of the context of work is in itself negative. And it's negative because they're drawing, as I've mentioned before, implicitly from base superstructure theory from within the larger program of Marxian conflict theory, which says there's these cultural forces at play that may not seem. directly related to, let's say, the capitalist with the means of production, but they're set up to create a false consciousness in which we are actually trying to help and support the capitalist who own the means of production, right? So if there is a culture of productive activity is good, idle hands, as the devil's playground, etc., that this is actually connected to the economic imperatives of the owners

of the capital making more money and exploiting the proletariat more, it's there to put inside this false consciousness of work is good and therefore we'll be more willing when it comes time to clock in at the factory to put in those long hours, right? So this is a standard Marxian critique has been around since the 19th century. It has definitely been revitalized in recent anti-productivity polemics. I would say even outside the world of work, this drive to want to do something. Like, let me go document something on Instagram. Let me build a canoe in my garage. Let me go train for an athletic event that this is itself negative.

It's just the part of this culture of production that is really in the inexploitative. And therefore, the revolutionary act is to resist this false drive towards production and just look at the sunset, look at flowers, just be. This is a very common argument in the elite circles that are writing anti-productivity polemics. So I'm going to look a little bit closer at this because though I get the base superstructure theory approach, as we've learned in the 150 years it's been since this theory really got articulated, is that it's often way too reductive and way too simplistic. And so to have a more nuanced look at this idea, production outside of work being good or bad, I want to briefly mention a study that a listener of this podcast recently sent to me. And let me see when this came out. This just came out recently. It came out this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

And this is a paper called Having Too Little or Too Much Time is linked to lower subjective well-being. This is written by Marisa Sheriff from Wharton and Cassie Maggallaglaner. sorry about that and Hal Herschfield both from UCLA. I'm not going to get into all the details of this paper because I'm just starting to read it now, but essentially this is summarizing the abstract. They looked at some large data sets from over 33,000 Americans to try to understand a relationship between discretionary time and subjective well-being. Now, they found, as we would probably expect, that if you had a very small,

amount of discretionary time, you were more likely to be stressed. And therefore, your subjective well-being as carefully measured in the quantitative metrics they used would be lower. The perhaps surprising finding is that the other direction showed up as well. Let me quote the paper here. Having an abundance of discretionary time is sometimes even linked to lower subjective well-being because of a lacking sense of a lacking sense of productivity. in such cases the negative effect of having too much discretionary time can be attenuated when people spend this time on productive activities, end quote.

I think this reality, which by the way we already know, is there any, let's say, retirement-related story that is more cliched than the longtime productive worker retires and is incredibly bored when they don't have things to do and have to go find aggressive hobbies or things. to join just so that they're not despondent with their lack of efficacious action. So we know this, and this data only emphasizes it, is that it's actually deeply human to participate in productive activity. We like to conceive of a goal in our brain, and then through coordinated activity over time, see that goal made manifest concretely in the world around us. If you talk to a paleoanthropologist, they would probably explain to you. to you, oh yes, this drive to conceive a goal and successfully organize your activity to execute

them is a very human thing. We do it at a scale that no other animal does. We get real satisfaction out of coming up with ideas and pursuing them and finishing them, and we get a complementary sense of real negative affect if we're not doing that. In modern terminology, we would call that state boredom. Bortem feels terrible. things to feel terrible usually have a strong evolutionary purpose. And in this case, it's probably to drive us to come up with ideas,

organizer activities towards actually seeing those ideas executed and completed. This is why humans, of course, had a huge advantage. We innovated tools. We innovated more complex social and community structures. We innovated technologies. It's why we became clearly the dominant species on the earth. So there's something deeply human about production, about doing things that are productive. So I think this belies the idea that when in your life outside of work you feel an urge to pick up a complicated hobby or document something or learn something new, it belies the idea that that is entirely culturally constructed.

And it was constructed only to make us vessels of exploitation for the owners of capital. That's graduate seminar stuff. And it's ivory tower stuff and ivory tower where they blacked over the windows. and aren't looking out at the world around us in common sense. We like to do stuff we're happy when we do stuff. We know this. This doesn't mean, however, that there's not negative cultural influences that might lead us to overwork, to over-schedule ourselves, to over-schedule our kids.

That also exists as well, but we need to nuance this argument. And so the way I'm going to propose that we think about this, we think about people that are over-send, stressed, overworked, over busy, outside of work. So we should think about this as a fundamental human drive subverted, not as a completely invented state of being that was completely culturally mediated. Let us use the analogy to food. Humans need to eat to survive.

Eating is good. It's an important part of life. It's not something bad. However, you can subvert this drive for food into eating too much food and food that is bad for you. Junk food subverts a completely normal, healthy, good human drive to eat. It subverts that drive by being hyper palatable and gets us to eat way too much and stuff that's not that good for us, way too much fat, way too much sugar.

We don't say hunger and the desire to eat is bad. We say junk food subverted that desire in a way that led to bad consequences. And maybe this is the nuanced way to think about the drive for production outside of work. that is good. We should have plans and goals and hobbies and objectives that we're pursuing. That is part of the human experience. Without it, we're going to be miserable.

But we should be on guard for that completely normal human drive to be subverted towards ends that aren't in our best interest. And this is a more nuanced way of looking at it. It is actually still within the spirit of this critique. Like a lot of this dialectical clash that we're attempting here between me and and the anthrop productivity movement is we're finding a lot of, I think, productive ideas. I'm sure they would hate me using that adjective. I'm sort of poking at them here a little bit by using that adjective to describe their ideas. A lot of useful ideas, but require a nuance, which I'm trying to inject here.

So if, for example, you find yourself really stressed or anxious from your extracurricular activities, if you will, there's so much stuff and so many goals you're moving around so much that you're stressed out or you're not sleeping or you're having to wake up too early to get these things. Okay, you're eating too much junk food. Let's pull back and eat clean. It doesn't mean that we're going to

start cursing the drive of the produce, but we're going to say let's pull this back into more human attributes. You have your kids in 27 different activities and you're trying to stage manage this just carefully so that they have every opportunity. You don't even quite know why other than if it gets to this college

that's going to open up some sort of opportunity and they're completely stressed out and your family is completely stressed out. You know, it's going from this to this. I drop this person off, go to this person off here. Okay, you're eating junk food. Let's pull back. Activity is good. Your kids have an activity is good.

Let's bring it back within the parameters of what's more humane, et cetera. All right. So anyways, this is the way I'm thinking about this now. We got to move past the graduate seminar idea that, again, mustache twirlers have invented this entire culture of wanting to produce stuff. We have to stop this game of really over-elaborating the relatively sparse research we have on the activities of extant hunter-gatherers to try to make the claim that our Paleolithic ancestors basically never worked and didn't like work.

And so any work that we're doing is a capitalist trying to exploit us. We have to stop quoting Max Weber and the Protestant work ethic. Okay, this is an early sociological theory that has been rebuked many times by looking at other places that were also Protestant that did not have the same work ethic as what was going on in the Americas. I think it's good to look at these things, but we have to acknowledge that humans like to produce things. They like to make plans.

They like to execute. They like their bullet journal where they can keep track of the books they've read and the walks they've gone on. And people want to strive and do things and complete things and get better at things. And that's as natural as eating. We just have to make sure that this. human drive stays within human parameters and that's hard work. And that's where we need to keep our focus.

All right. Let's get started with some questions about deep work. Our first one comes from Sean. Sean says, I read your books. I love the latest one, a world without email. I am implementing workflows. And the easiest one is booking a meeting via Call and Lee instead of just doing back and forth messaging.

I would love to crowdsource or tap into your knowledge to figure out the top 10 workflow upgrades to put on my target list. So a brief primer for those who have not read a world without email. And if you haven't, by the way, you got to read it. If you're listening to this podcast, it's one of the key source materials for the podcast. But the big argument, of course, as most of you know, is that once low friction digital communication tools like email entered the workplace, we began to drift towards a mode of collaboration called the hyperactive hive mind where we handle most coordination and collaboration

with unscheduled back and forth messages. This causes a lot of problems. Makes us miserable, makes us unproductive, makes our brain significantly less able to function. And so the solution I argue is to go process by process in your work life and replace the hyperactive hive mind for each of these processes with an explicit alternative. Here are the rules and systems by which we do the communication and collaboration needed to get this thing we do on a regular basis done so that we don't just fall back to. We'll just go back and forth on Slack or email. So Sean is asking, what are some of the popular workflows that people fall back on when they begin replacing the hyperactive hive mind process by process in their work life?

Well, I don't have a top 10, Sean, but let me give you four that come up often and are a great entry point into making this step away, this transition. away from the hyperactive hive mind. Number one is what you mentioned. One of the easiest processes to upgrade is how you schedule meetings. Use a scheduling tool like Calendly, like Schedule Once, like the built-in shared calendar features in Microsoft Outlook, whatever tool you want to use, but use a tool where if someone wants to schedule a meeting with you, you can expose to them your available times. They can choose a time.

It automatically goes on to both of your calendars. This seems like a minor thing. Like why bothers someone with that link when we could just kind of figure it out real quick with back and forth emails? But here is the reality. There is a surprisingly large cognitive impact on meeting scheduling. So let's just work through an example really quick. Let's say me and you need to set up a meeting tomorrow before our client comes in that afternoon because we need to talk through our strategy. Okay.

The hyperactive high mind approach would be, hey, Sean, we should meet before the thing tomorrow when you free. Sean's like, okay, I don't know, maybe in the afternoon, is that work for you? And you're like, yeah, okay, let's do afternoon. Like, how about three? And like, no, no, I have a thing from three to four, but we could do one. And you're like, no, no, here's a thing. I have a thing from one, but maybe we could fit it in at like 430. And he's like, yeah, okay, let's do that if we can end the 430 works or something like this, right?

That's five or six back and forth messages. Seems like not a big deal. But here's the thing. Each one of those messages has to be noticed and responded to quickly because all five or six of those messages have to happen in a pretty short window because this meeting has to get scheduled before tomorrow and it's an open loop. When I know that you and I are in the process of scheduling a meeting, I want that to be done. So it's going to be taking up some cognitive real estate until it's done. So we kind of want to make this happen. Now, if we're not just going immediately back

and forth with these messages, this is going to require me to keep checking my inbox and Sean to keep checking his inbox because we have to catch each of those messages when it gets here. So let's say we end up doing 10 inbox checks en route to each of those messages being received. Five to six messages has just created now 50 to 60 inbox checks in one afternoon. Each one of those inbox checks initiates a context switch, which is going to reduce your cognitive capacity for 10 to 20 minutes to follow. So you have basically with just this one meeting your scheduling completely subverted the cognitive capacity of two people for an entire afternoon.

Now imagine you have four or five meetings at any one time you're scheduling. Meetings alone can be a massive drain. In other words, it's a sneakily, it's a sneakily impactful type of communication because it has this very rapid back and forth nature to it. So use a tool like Cali or Schedule once. Yeah, it's a little bit more. more problem to set it up. Yeah, you have to do a little bit of social, you know, feather smoothing so that people don't feel, uh, insulted that you're sending them to a link. You have to say,

I know you're so busy. So I put all my times on here so you could choose what works for you. Yeah, do what you got to do. And that first message takes 30 seconds to explain this instead of five seconds to say, how about today and get it off your, get it off your plate right away. But you've saved 50 to 60 context switches per meeting scheduling. So that's low hanging fruit. Low-hanging fruit number two, office hours. Regular times, regular days every week. My office door is open. My phone is on.

My Slack is open. My Zoom is on. Whatever tools you use. I'm just here. Quick questions, quick discussion. And defer, defer, defer. Anytime that email arrives in your inbox, it's going to be more than just one message response.

More than just you saying, yeah, oh, you're asking me what time they mean is tomorrow. It's 12. Anything that requires more back and forth than that. Hey, what are your thoughts on this? You know what's going on with whatever. Should we come up with a plan for this? Just defer. Grab me at my office hours.

Grab me at my office hours. Grab me at my office hours. You're deferring this back and forth conversation until a time where you can be synchronous and get it done real efficiently without a huge overhead of scheduling an independent session for each of these synchronous conversations. Low-hanging fruit. But this process is going to make a huge difference in terms of getting you away from that hyperactive hive mind, constant context switching.

All right. Let's do two more. Let's get a little bit more advanced. If there's any type of document or information or report that you are involved in producing on a regular basis with other people, try an automated shared document process. Here's how this works. You talk to the people involved and you come up with, here are the steps we do in order each time this thing has to be produced. Once we agree on the steps, we don't have to communicate about it. I use this example a lot in my interviews where you're doing something like, hey friends, you know, here's this report we have to produce once a month.

Here's how we're going to do it. On Monday of the week it's due, I'm going to write a rough draft of the report in a Google doc in this shared directory that you have access to. I will be done with my draft by noon on Monday. Go in there between noon on Monday and noon on Tuesday and any comments you have, add them using the comment feature in the shared Google Doc. I have time put aside every Tuesday afternoon where I will integrate your comments. Okay.

Produce the final report. The production designer, the production designer who takes our reports and puts into the nice PDF formats also on this chain where you're agreeing on the rules. Hey, production designer Diana. Close a business Tuesday. Whatever you find in that Google Doc, the share director you have access to, that's the final document. You can grab that. You can put it into the final form. Move that PDF form into this drop box over here.

Have that done by close of business Wednesday. I have told our supervisor that by close a business Wednesday there will be a PDF there for him to give his final approval to. and what he will do is he will market. If there's any other final changes that have to happen, he will mark it right in the PDF itself and the production designer at the noon on whatever. We'll grab it, make those final changes and post it or whatever, right? And if you want to be really advanced, maybe you say,

if anything requires discussion, I have office hours Tuesday afternoon, so come by those office hours and that's when we'll discuss. There's a lot of different work and a lot of different knowledge work jobs it's roughly congruent to that example. You have something you have to produce with people on a regular basis. Put in place a process like that. We agree on the time and steps.

Here's where the information is. Here's the time by which that information gets modified. Here's the form in which that information gets modified. Here's the pipeline this information moves down. Have this meeting once. And now you're able to produce this report with no unscheduled back and forth messages. Huge win. All right.

Let me give one more. one more example. And that is the shared agenda document workflow. So if there's a regular occurring meeting, it's with a client, it's a staff meeting to get up to speed on the week or whatever, have a shared document that all of the relevant people have access to. And the workflow is you put in there the questions you want to discuss at the next meeting. Here's the question.

Here's the elaboration. Here's the examples. Here's any relevant files. we all read this thing before the meeting. And then when we get to the meeting, we see what the agenda is and we can go through and we can have prepared. If we see a question show up that we know something about, we can go get some information. We can even update that document before we get to the meeting. You basically are allowing questions and information and reactions to build without unscheduled messages organically before a meeting where can all then be discussed.

And again, this saves that instead with all these issues just having people grab people when they have questions. or problems. Hey, what about this? There's an issue with my office. What's going on with this new client initiative? I have an issue with this. Like set up a discussion meeting where people build the discussion topics and react to discussion topics on a shared document in advance. Again, a simple workflow, but it saves unscheduled messages. And that is the whole ballgame when you're trying to get past the hyperactive hive mind. So, Sean, thank you for that question. It's a long answer. But it was worthy of a long answer because a lot of readers of that book are hungry for more and more examples.

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that code cow to save $5 off. This podcast is sponsored by Grammarly. Writing is power in our current world. The more clearly you can express yourself, the more seriously you will be taken. and the more opportunities that will be open to you. The key is making sure that you express yourself as clearly as possible. Now, if you're a professional writer like me, you get to work with a lot of different editors. But if you're not, you can use Grammarly Premium to help you get that same type of attention.

Grammarly Premium does more than just correct grammar or spelling mistakes. It can actually give you clarity suggestions. How do we avoid, for example, repeated or unnecessary words? It will also give you vocabulary suggestions. No more searching for synonyms. It can offer suggestions to replace overused words or overused phrases. When I use Grammarly Premium, I am impressed by the intelligence of these suggestions. It makes the writing better, all without having to have an actual editor sitting there looking over your shoulder.

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and I am fascinated with your work on making my life more productive and happy with deep work. As I need to read a lot of papers, I want to do it efficiently, but I have a fear that if I'm not looking to the details, I will miss some treasure. He then goes on to ask about literature management software like Zotero or Research Rabbit. Patrick, here's the long and short of it. Reading an academic paper in a way that you understand what's going on is hard and time-consuming. Reading an academic paper so you really understand the details of what they did, how they got their result, is very hard and very time-consuming.

And I think it's important to recognize that. so that you don't have the sense that it's something you can just be doing casually in the background and keeping up with the literature. It's really hard to understand these papers. What I typically recommend is don't try to just keep up in general with all of the literature in your broad field. Let specific projects and reading groups be the main drivers of your encounters with the literature. So specific projects means I am working on this research project and I am reading other papers that directly will help me with this project. That is a real motivation to actually get those papers read and understood and you get

immediate reward for it. The reading group approach is, here's a reading group led by a professor and a bunch of students, grad students, and we're trying to master a new topic. And of course, that's another incentive to do the reading because everyone is involved with this group. You take turns actually presenting the paper, so you learn a lot but distribute the effort a little bit more. That's a reasonable way to keep up with a lot of papers.

In terms of the depth you have to get into, it depends on your purpose. I mean, at the very least, in about 20 minutes, you can understand, here's what this paper looks at, here's the type of techniques it uses, and the type of things they show. But just enough information that if that seems relevant later on, you can go deeper and say, well, what exactly were these techniques and what exactly did they show? If you're doing theory papers, you know, what you really want to get at is what is the exact model here, what is the exact problem, what did we know about this problem in this. model, what do we get with this new paper? What was the, generally speaking, the technique that got there? You can usually figure that out in about 20 or 30 minutes to actually understand the new technique could take you four or five hours, a couple days even, so be wary about that. With systems papers, I'm not a systems researcher, but a trick I learned studying distributed systems. I took

Robert Morris's distributed systems class at MIT when I was there in grad school. And one of the things I learned from Morris's class was with systems papers, go right to the figures. If you can understand what's going on to those figures, you understand the paper. This is how he would actually test you. Like, in this class, you would read papers about distributed systems, and the test would ask you questions like, okay, if we were using this system and you doubled the number of processors, what do you expect to happen with the, you know, load overhead or something? And to answer those questions, you had to understand the plots.

Like, why is this curve on this performance plot going this way? What's on the axes? What does this tell us? Why is it sigmoidal instead of, you know, linear or quadratic? So the plots actually have all the information really in systems paper. So if you want to go deep on a systems paper, understand the plots. But, Patrick, my big point here is don't underestimate the difficulty of academic papers. Don't beat yourself up for not staying on top of 20 papers a month.

Let specific projects and reading groups drive you. when you encounter a paper, try to get those basics of here's what they show and why it's important and only really go deep into how exactly do they get these results if you really have to. You got to triage your time here. Our next question comes from Philippe, who says, how much studying is enough for a college student? Well, the core of my advice here, Felipe, is to banish the word studying. from your vocabulary. It's ambiguous, it's emotional, it's not nearly specific enough to be useful if your goal is to be good at being a student. In those books I wrote so long ago about how to study at college, one of the key ideas I had is that what you're doing here is coming up with a specific evidence-based plan for preparing for the particular challenge in front of you.

You have a discrete mathematics in-class midterm. What are the exact mechanics of how you're going to prepare for that test? And why are you doing those exact mechanics? Have you tried it before? Is there any step in there that seems wasted? Can you streamline this? Are you missing something that you should probably do? Great.

Now that you know what the plan is, when are you going to actually schedule that activity on your calendar? Boom, it's on your calendar. Execute. Oh, you have to write a paper. All right. What are the exact steps? What is the evidence-backed process you are going to take to write that paper? What are the various steps of it?

Great. Where are you going to do that work? When you're going to do that work? Get it on your calendar. When you get there, execute. That is the way you should be thinking about schoolwork. What a lot of students do instead is they have study be an ambiguous activity. And they have this weird penance model of, I should be doing enough of this ambiguous activity that it feels bad or bold.

or hard, and then I feel like I've done my penance, and then hopefully I will get a dispensation from the godlike professor in the form of a good grade. It's like this, I'm trading discomfort and toil for grade. Forget all of that. You're doing specific evidence-based activities to produce the grade. How much time do you need to do these activities, however much time it takes to execute them. What you should be thinking about is what are the activities I'm doing for this particular academic, particular academic objective. Why are those the activities I think are best? Is there any waste in there I can get rid of?

Then execute. And when you're done, look back and say, let me do a post-mortem. You know, this time I spent highlighting the textbook was a waste. I won't do that next time. Flashcards. This is what really mattered. I need to get started on that a little bit earlier. Boom, I've learned.

Next time my activities will be more evidence back, more polished. That's how you act like a professional student. Don't use the word studying. forget about time. It's about good plans, executing plans. There's a talk I gave back really early, I guess this was at my time at Georgetown, or maybe late at my time at MIT. I gave this talk at an El Centro Community College in Texas and Dallas. The talk is on YouTube. And I get into some of this. All right, I found it here. Search for 2012, Texas Regional Project.

study 30 minutes a day, get a 4.0 GPA. This is my talk I gave. Man, I look young and skinny. I look like I'm 17 years old in this talk. Ooh. All right, but anyways, it's a talk I gave. This has done the rounds on the internet. I'm looking at it now.

It's had over 160,000 views. So it's done its rounds. But Felipe, look at that talk. I get into this. But if you really want to get into it, read how to become a straight-a student, and you will get my whole philosophy on this topic. All right, let's do a quick one here from dev.

How do you defeat the urge of getting distracted? Well, if you're talking about during work hours, dev, you use time block planning. The one commitment you make is that I try to stick to the block in which I currently am. Make your time block plan reasonable, both in terms of how long your day goes, how much time you give each of your blocks, but also having downtime and breaks integrated into your time block schedule. If you have a reasonable number of breaks in your schedule, you're much less likely to be distracted now in the moment when you're supposed to be writing because you say that's not, I'm in a writing block right now, but there's a block where I can go on the internet and I can gorge on stories about Juan Soto because let's be honest, he should be getting MVP votes. That's a debate that I think I should. That should be my deep dive. The case for Juan Soto over Bryce Harper for MVP votes.

Great. There's a block for that coming up. So I'm not going to look at it now because then I'd be blowing up my time block schedule and I'd have to rebuild my time block schedule and I feel pretty bad about myself because I had a block coming up to do that and I just couldn't make it there. So time block schedule, reasonable time block schedule, include breaks in there. That's your best bet. If you don't do that, if you're just running your day with the list reactive method and you know you're going to take breaks at some undefined point, then at every single moment you have to argue with your mind about, well, why not now? But why not now? but why not now?

And you're going to lose that argument more times than you win. All right, let's do one more work question. This one comes from Skeptic Man. He says, how do you time block plan when your corporate email is Outlook? And it's inefficient to set up time block planning manually and then repeat that in Outlook. Inefficient. Skeptic Man, what are you? Frederick Winslow Taylor?

I mean, come on. This idea that you have to spend, what, two extra minutes out of an eight-hour workday copying a time block plan from your planner into, let's say, your outlook calendar, or something like this. Who cares? I mean, yes, objectively speaking, that takes more time than not doing that, but we're missing the forest for the trees. The goal in time block planning, the goal in productivity in general, when we're, we're talking about non-entry-level knowledge work is the production of effective results and the organization of your work such that things do not get dropped and you're reliable.

You need to be reliable. You need to produce. You've got to be organized. You've got to be intentional about your time. It's not to be as efficient as possible. It's not to try to squeeze every couple of minutes of overhead out of your schedule because that shouldn't matter. If you're running your schedule properly and taking care of your mind properly,

a couple extra minutes here, a couple extra minutes there. who cares? You got four hours of deep work in the day. You're moving your task around your task board like a pro. I mean, a lot of what I talk about for organizing your work and being intentional about your time is a lot of overhead, but you produce a lot more and you don't drop things to the cracks and that's what matters. So, you know, look, skeptic man, I'm beating up on your answer here a little bit because I want to make this broader point. I'm not that interested in efficiency. I'm interested in effectiveness. So if the key to you using time block planning is that you're going to have to put some of this stuff into your Microsoft Outlook

calendar, take the five minutes because you're going to 2x your effective output if your time block planning. That is worth the extra five minutes in the morning to click on those little boxes on your computer screen. All right. I said that last question would be my last work question, but I just came across another one I think is good. So let me shoehorn in one more deep work question here.

And this one comes from Kevin. and Kevin says, Could you compare and contrast the productivity prong movement with your advice in a world without email to focus on processes? This is a really good question.

For those who don't know that elite speak term productivity prong, I recommend that you read my New Yorker article, The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done, where I talk about this movement.

Very briefly, this is a movement that emerged in the early 2000s and really random its course by the end of the first decade of the 2000s. It was a movement that said, if we use high-tech computer-boasted tools, if we integrate what computers can help us do with complex software, custom software, custom configurations of software, and related computer-related tools, if we combine that with personal productivity, we can get a huge benefit out of our

personal productivity. And there was this promise offered by productivity. And there was this promise offered by productivity prong that tech was going to make work easy. And really, there was a conciliance that formed between David Allen's getting things done and then Macintosh enthusiast in general. Merlin Mann, who's the core of that New Yorker article is one of the big proponents of this at the time. He's no longer the article's about that change. The idea was, okay, we can break down all of our work into these tasks.

We can put these tasks into database-driven software, the database-driven software with the right, set up and algorithms can basically just make sense of this and tell us, do this next, do that next, do this next, make work basically an effortless sort of agnostic churning of widget production. As I argue in that article, and I've argued on this podcast, it doesn't work. Work is hard. Work requires non-trivial, non-linear creative thinking and effort. Software was not a magic bullet.

Complex, customizable software did not make work much easier. It still remained hard. And too much work is too much work, and it couldn't solve that problem either. So, Kevin's question is, in a world without email, as we got into earlier in this episode, I talk about putting in place workflows that are an alternative to the hyperactive hive mind. Is this the same type of thing? And I think now that we've gone a little bit deeper into the definition of productivity prong, we see that it's not. So the whole promise of productivity prong is that software was going to make work easy and tame the pain of overwork, of having too much on your plate. The goal of these workflows in a world without email is not that.

It is to reduce unscheduled messages so that we do not induce unnecessary contact shifts. So it argues we should be more intentional about how we communicate and how we collaborate. We should put in place processes and systems here with the goal of minimizing. the sort of unscheduled messaging, minimizing the context shifts because that's going to work better with the way the human mind actually functions. So that's different.

That's not trying to tame work with technology, tame work with software or algorithms, it's trying to just re-engineer our workflows to work better with our brain. And that could be technology involved or could have nothing to do with technology. So it's a good question, but these are two different things.

I think the, the, uh, a carry and hubris of the productivity prawn movement was that the software was going to take away the difficulty of work from the human brain. Nothing like that is being claimed in a world without email. We're just saying the human brain can't context shifts so much. So let's be more careful about how we work together

so that we don't have to have nearly as many context shifts. All right, let's move on to some questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Kelly, who says, After discovering it, why have you chosen not to pursue fire? Where fire here, of course, is the acronym for Financial Independence Retire Early.

Kelly elaborates, In your book, Digital Minimalism, you profile some people from the fire community, including Mr. Money Mustache and Mrs. Frugal Woods. You've also appeared on some fire podcast, too, like the mad fientist, so I think it's safe to say that you've been exposed to the fire movement,

generally. However, you're still working at the university full time and writing semi full time. And at least you have never mentioned that you are personally pursuing fire. I am always curious to understand people who discover fire, but choose not to pursue it. All right. So for those of you who did not read digital minimalism, fire, which again stands for financial independence, retire early is a movement that is aimed at gaining financial independence much earlier in your life. The basic idea of fires, it tends to be aimed at people that are producing sort of healthy middle class or lower upper middle class income. So maybe you have, for example, a dual income, like very common in the D.C. suburbs where I live, dual income government jobs, for example. So, you know, you're not in the top 1%, but you have a lot of money coming in.

Or a lot of fire people, they'll be, you know, someone will be involved in tech and like they're making good money, right? And the math behind fire, the idea is if you can reduce your expenses dramatically, two things happen. One, the amount of money that you are saving each year gets really big because you are only spending a little bit of your income. And two, the amount of money you have to save to maintain this cheap lifestyle gets much smaller than, say, the amount of money you would have to save to sustain your normal salary. Like just to use some round numbers, let's ignore taxes for now. Let's say you make $100,000 a year, but you are living comfortably on just $20,000 a year. Well, if you believe in something like the 4% rule, it would be sufficient to save up $500,000,000. thousand dollars you should be able to inflation adjusted remove twenty thousand dollars a year

from those investments into perpetuity uh and not actually lose your nest egg there so if you can save five hundred thousand dollars you now can live without having to work well if you make a hundred thousand dollars you're saving eighty thousand dollars a year so in a little bit after six years you'll have enough money to actually retire these are made up numbers but just gives you a sense of the core idea behind early retirement community so then the notion is People start doing this typically when they're later in their 20s and when they're in their late 30s, they are then financially independent. They often still work, but they can work on their own terms. They can leave their job and go to a part-time job.

They can do Tim Ferriss-style mini-retirements. I will work as a consultant or a contractor for a year, then take two years off, etc. So you get all this flexibility in your life. So anyways, that is the fire movement. And it's an interesting one. So Kelly is asking, do I do fire? Why don't I do fire? The whole point of fire typically is that you want autonomy.

It usually starts where people feel overwhelmed by their work. They feel locked into these cubicles. They feel like they're in Mike Judge's office space again and again. And they want some autonomy. I don't want to have to work so many hours. I want flexibility of when I work, what I work on. I want the ability to take long breaks when I want to take breaks to live in interesting places. Well, here's the thing.

I have all of that. You know, as a ten-year professor, there's a huge amount of flexibility in what I work on and when I work on it. I don't take any summer salary from the university in the summer. So I am completely on my own, for example, in the summer. I can do whatever I want.

I pay myself in the summer. I'm in charge of what research I want to work on, when I want to work on it, right? I mean, it has a lot of the things that people try to get to through fire. And then when you throw in the fortunate benefits of being a writer who has had some success in writing, that just opens up even more flexibility and autonomy and what I want to do. So in some sense, I've achieved the goal that fire is trying to achieve. My work is not something I'm trying to escape to get more autonomy.

I already have the type of highly autonomous, creative, impactful work that people want to get to after they want to enable through financial independence. I will, however, say we have been, we've been influenced by fire. Like a lot of writers I know who, you know, have been fortunate enough to have some success with some books. We definitely have the pessimistic mindset that this will not last. This book being successful doesn't mean a book 10 years from now will as well. So we are fire inspired in the sense that we try to keep our monthly expenses, what it actually costs to keep our family's life running as low as possible, modest cars that we own, a very small mortgage on our house, education costs to the extent

possible prepaid with book money that was coming in when times are good. So we do try to keep our expenses low. Why? So we have flexibility. And if we get to a point in the future where maybe not as much money is coming in from book income, that we can still take off an entire summer and, you know, go to the woods somewhere or go on adventures that aren't particularly expensive but require a little lot of time. So I'm very influenced by the fire goal of having a lot of autonomy in your life and your

work. I'm very influenced by the fire notion that lower necessary outlays in your life open up a lot of flexibility. I mean, there's fewer things that would make me more anxious or nervous than like moving to the posh D.C. suburbs where all of the lawyers live, right? And getting that expensive house and then getting the nicer car and then getting the vacation house that has the second mortgage on it and just feeling trapped. But my God, I have to produce this much income, you know, every single year to try to keep up with all these expenses. That gives me cold sweats.

I don't want anything to do with that, you know. I want to have huge flexibility. And that is a fired inspired idea. So I would say, okay, I maybe am not a traditional exemplar of fire in the sense of having extremely low expenses, but I like what they're doing and I'm inspired by their general, the general goals of that movement are general goals. My family shares as well. All right.

Wolf asks, how do you avoid confirmation bias? Well, I don't know that I always successfully do so, Wolf. I don't know that you always want thinkers to do so, right? I mean, a big part of the way that knowledge advances is that it kind of want thinkers to go all in and take a swing and then have other thinkers come and take a counter swing and then other thinkers come and say no both of you were wrong and in that collision you as the third party observer gains more nuanced knowledge so to some degree this is what happens in almost any type of professional thought is like you go all in and take your swing and then

you know see where that ball goes that being said i don't want to be blindly falling in the confirmation bias traps and so my strategy with both professional things but just other parts of my life. Politics, public health, like COVID, for example. COVID policy. My theory, my strategy, I should say, is always consistently read the smartest people who disagree with your point of view. I really do that. I do that on politics all the time.

I've been doing that with COVID. Whenever I find myself feeling pretty strongly about something, I find the smartest person I can who disagrees. Almost always I feel a lot less smart after I do that. Sometimes I will change my stance. Often what happens is I end up nuisance my stance. Like, you know, yeah, I'm going too far on that here. Like, I get why they're saying that.

And also you can you can aim your critiques. I mean, I think there's this fear, if you'll excuse a little sermon here, Wolf, I think there's this fear that when you feel strongly about a point of view or maybe you feel very scared about not having this point of view. because there could be ramifications, that you get afraid that if I expose myself to smart people on the other side, that I'm going to betray that point of view and the people by which it supports,

or maybe I'll even be tricked. They'll say most people are more worried about other people getting tricked. They usually feel confident, I won't get tricked, but you shouldn't read that. You might get tricked. Here's from my experience. Sometimes when you encounter smart people on the other side, you change your view.

Usually what happens is you keep your view. and your critique of the other sides get better. It gets better because it gets nuanced and it gets more accurate. So instead of saying like, okay, well, these other people, they're just evil. It's not a very powerful critique. Go read the very smartest people on the other side. You're like, well, they're not evil. And actually, this and this is a pretty good point and this is really being reported wrong.

And that blows it out of proportion. But look at this aspect of what they're saying here. Yeah, that's where I really get to the core of what's going on. here is they're insecure right there. And they're trying to hold on to this or project this. And now you have a much more focus critique. If you read the best polemicist on any issue, the ones who are assassins with their words, right? The way they get there is they go deep on the very best critiques of the other side.

They understand the inside and out so they can figure out, okay, but this, if I still feel like I'm right here, I can pinpoint why. this is what's really going on over there with your argument and boom they come in and it's like a rapier to the throat boom i got you right all right so sermon over but wolf what i'm trying to say is two things and i'll summarize it one it's okay i think for public thinkers to not laden down when they're taking a swing at something to laden it down with caveats and except for not here and of course this might be going too far let them take their swing let other people take counter swings, take this all in, contrast it to your personal experience, you will have a nuanced conclusion will come out of it. That's fine. But two, probably the best thing we can do to take

confirmation bias out of our lives is to just read the smartest people on the other side. You're not going to get tricked into believing something that's wrong. You're not betraying the people who don't like that other side. You're going to get a more nuanced understanding of reality. And if your critiques of the other side aren't going to dissipate, they're probably going to become more effective. So we should all speak. spend more time doing that. All right, we got a question here from M. M says, you've talked in the past about how terrible TikTok is, and I agree completely. I think it's pretty toxic and addicting for the teens that I know who use it.

I've never used it, and I do consider myself to be a digital minimalist. That being said, what are your thoughts on using that platform to engage with people where they are already are? If people are already using it, does it make more sense to try to engage with them on that platform? Well, Em, if you don't mind me talking in generalities, I think you should engage with people on the platforms that you're comfortable using yourself. Don't force yourself to use a platform that not only do you not like, but you find uncomfortable, but you actually find its whole existence uncomfortable. I think you are going to feel as if you were making a moral compromise by going onto that platform if that's how you feel. I think I am a perhaps a living example of find the platforms you are comfortable with and focus on, you know, being engaging, saying the things that are worth saying, saying things that people are going to want to hear, and people will find you. I want to overthink exactly what platform you use, and I think it's fine for people to use what they're comfortable using.

All right, let's do one more question here. This one's from Andrea. Andrea says, have you changed your mind about your philosophical stance regarding deep work? As she elaborates, in your book Deep Work, you state, quote, as I emphasize in this book's introduction, I have no interest in this debate. A commitment to Deep Work is not a moral stance and it's not a philosophical statement. It is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done. Deep work is important, not because distraction is evil, but because it enabled Bill Gates to start a billion dollar industry in less than a semester, in quote.

A little bit of context about that. That quote comes right after a story about how Bill Gates did this intense focus to write the original version of Basic for the Mitz Altair, which was the product that got Microsoft started as a company. All right, back to Andrea's elaboration. She says, it seems to me, however, that you do value deep work and the deep life digital minimalism as a philosophical or value system that has a clear moral deline. This is a good question.

Let me provide a little bit more background on that quote from the book deep work. What I was trying to do there was to remove my book deep work from a just starting to get going conversation about distraction and too many meetings and too much email and this not being good. and work is broken. I was trying in that book to avoid all of that and say, I don't want to get into a fight about whether all this email is stupid or if this is what work is and we need this to be effective at work. I just want to argue that this strategy of sustaining focus without context shifts produces a lot of value.

Just straight up, if you want your company to be more successful, you should do this. Because what I sensed at that time in 2016 when that book came out, that if I came out swinging about how bosses are sending too many emails and setting too many meetings and how we spend too much time in our inbox that that would become the battle. And the battle would become about whether that was good or bad. And that the whole discussion would be, well, wait a second, my job, that is my job. And don't say that's bad. And you just don't like modern technology.

And I didn't want to get involved with that battle at all with the book deep work. I wanted to just say, look, this activity of sustained focus without contact shifts produces a lot of value. If you want to produce value, you should do some of this. I'm going to sidestep that whole debate, which is why in deep work, I don't really talk about why we're so distracted to a big degree. I don't make a big case that is bad. It's like, forget that. I want to talk about why this thing over here is good. Now, later with my book, A World Without Email, I picked up that case and said, okay, now I have enough breathing room.

The spin 200 pages actually getting into, why are we so distracted? Let's take on that argument. and I will actually make that argument because I've done more work on this than you have. I've read all the articles. I've read all the research papers. I went through the New York Times Business Archive for 20 years to see every mention of email. I've read every paper that Gloria Mark ever wrote. I've been thinking about this for six years.

Now I'm ready for the debate that, yes, this way we work right now is broken. I wasn't ready for that debate when I wrote deep work, so I didn't have it. I said, I don't want to argue about email being good or bad. I just want to talk about this activity being valuable. So I don't think it's fair to say then probably now that deep work is entirely outside of a philosophical stance of a life well-lived because I think it is integrated into my broader worldview of the deep life. I think with a world without email, I brought a moral delineation, maybe not a moral delineation, but an economic productivity delineation about the way we're working is wrong. We need to move past all the hyperactive hive mind distraction and deep work should be a part of that. And now I have filled out that argument.

So if you combine deep work with a world without email, you get a much broader argument that is not just purely this thing is valuable. It's also the other thing we're doing is bad. And the deep life umbrella for all of this, I think, is explicitly philosophically moral in the sense of it's a vision of a life well lived. And so I think you're right to point out that my work is not devoid of philosophical stances or moral delineations, but that one book was temporarily. and for that purpose. So that's a good clarification, and Andrea, thanks for the chance,

giving me the chance to get into that a little bit. And with that, I have to run, literally, a little bit late to go pick my kids up from the bus stop. Thanks for the questions.

I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode and until then, as always, stay deep.