Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 136: LISTENER CALLS: Reversing Burnout

Episode Date: October 7, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.OPENING: Some Thoughts on Slow Productivity. [0:21]LISTENER CALLS - Taming client email as a busy lawyer.[3:44] - How I maintain my systems. [11:42] - The danger of too much productivity. [[17:02] - Benjamin Franklin, tedious Harvard types, and awe. [22:54] - Students and theory. [34:12] - Reversing burnout. [38:05] 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 136. So today is a listener calls mini episode. I have pulled out six calls from the archive. I hope to get through all six in today's episode. First, however, I wanted to mention something I've been observing recently. For some reason, and I'm not quite sure why, the past week or two, I haven't been nailing my time block plans.

And what I mean by that is they're not quite accurate. And on average, I am losing one major thing for my time block plan per day. In other words, there's one major thing in my plan that I don't get to each day. I normally pride myself in the accuracy of my time blocking because I've been doing it for a long time. But for whatever reason, and I have some theories, but it's somewhat orthogonal to the issue here. So let's put those theories aside. but for whatever reason, about one of the big things I plan each day is not getting done.

Two key observations about that that I was just thinking about earlier today. One, taking one major thing off my schedule each day actually makes that day much better. I have more breathing room. Typically, the day ends gradually as opposed to a panicked sprint and take longer lunch. I don't feel as much of a sense of urgency around what remains. It really frees up a lot of breathing room. When you take one, say, 90 minute, even sometimes up to a two hour long chunk thing out of the day, it frees up room for everything else.

Two, I don't know that it's making a big difference on my big picture production. I mean, my classes are getting taught. I'm dealing with my students. Progress is happening on my book proposal. Articles are getting written for the New Yorker. My CS research is going a little bit slow, but I've been working on it, and I think we're starting to get some momentum there. So everything seems fine. Those two observations, I think, actually point to a deeper truth, a deeper truth that I could put under this umbrella of this concept I'm trying to develop this fall about slow productivity.

That in the short term, doing less, and by less, mean, let's crowd today a little bit less. Let's take out that one 90-minute thing that we were going to do. Let's do one less thing. Let's give ourselves a little bit more breathing room. Let's build a schedule in which actually we have more than enough time to actually get these things done. There's actually some time in there that's unspoken for. So if something overflows, we could do it there or we could just take a walk, whatever, has these huge benefits to the subjective experience of the day.

But again, does it really matter in the long run? In the sense of the big picture production, the slow productivity scale of what you produce on the scale of years, not on the scale of days and weeks. Anyway, slow productivity is a topic that is interesting to me. This, I think, is an example of this fledgling theory being applied. I've been scheduling poorly, so I've been canceling some things. Cancelling things make me feel better. And in the end, I don't know that it really makes a difference in terms of how successful

I am in producing things. And the big picture that I'm proud of. All right, anyways, just some food. for thought. Let's get right into this week's questions. The first question has to do with dealing with incoming client communication. Hi, Cal, my name is Sarah, and I'm an attorney out in Oregon. My question is about email. I hate email. I've read your books about email, and I'm hoping you have some thoughts. As an attorney, I have an ethical duty to get back to clients in a timely manner to keep them informed and to otherwise be accessible to clients when they have a need for my legal

services. The problem is that it becomes a one-way street of incoming emails with no ability to set filters, set expectations, or to otherwise give an indicia of my ability to get back to them in a timely manner. I have tried an out-of-office responder, but that seems to just either be ignored or to set more anxiety for clients and then they start calling my office as well. Do you have any thoughts for stemming the tide of email bombardment? Thanks. Well, Sarah, this is a good question because it applies to many different client facing jobs and not just the legal profession. My general rule in these situations is that clarity trumps accessibility. If I am a client of yours, regardless of what industry where talking about here. If I am a client of yours and something comes up that I need an answer from you,

some feedback from you, I need you to check this. Is this okay? Should I be worried about this? And there's really no structure in place for this is how these type of communication happens that I trust. I'm stuck trying to keep track of this in my own head. And I have a lot of other things going on and that's stressful. So I need to get it onto your plate and trust that it's on your plate. And if I have no other way of doing this, no other system or expectations, what I'm going to fall back on is I email you, you answer that email really soon because I'm going to hold on to this anxious about it until you answer. Once you answer, it's like, great, now this is off my plate, Sarah has it. Accessibility, in other words, is a default that occurs in the absence of a clear

alternative. This is why, for example, if you just say, I'm gone today, don't bother me on email, it creates anxiety and you get phone calls because people say, wait a second, I don't know how else to get these things to you that are on my head. What I've been doing is just emailing you. You email back quickly. Then I can't release it. Now you're saying you're going to be gone all day. I can't tolerate that.

I can't think about this all day. I'm going to call you. Let's figure this out right now. They've been trained. You get a quick response is how you can release this thing from having to worry about it. So you need clarity as an alternative. You need some sort of other clear way in which clients can communicate with you about this. We see this in other sectors, right?

I mean, think about IT support. Yes, it would be very convenient if you could just email your IT department and they would always answer right away. Yes, Sarah, let's fix this problem. Let's go on. But it's not what happens. You get a ticket. The ticket goes into a system.

You get updates on that ticket and you hear back soon. But, you know, it might depend on how many other tickets the IT people are working on. It's a little bit less convenient for you. But at least you trust it. You're like, look, I sent this thing. I got back a note. It said your ticket number, whatever. this is where the updates will come. It's being looked at.

You trust it will get to them in the system. They'll get back to you. You don't have to think about it. And we tolerate it. Similar with doctors. Most people do not expect that they can just email their doctor and say, look, I have this rational answer within two minutes. Like, here's what's going on. That would be nice if we could. But that's not the way doctors work. Their time is structured into these appointments that they're billing for, etc. So there's usually some system where you have to call and talk to the nurse and either set up an appointment or leave a message. and then later in the day, they go through their messages and they'll get back to you the next day.

And, you know, we expect that. Be nice if they answer email right away, but there is an alternative that's clear and we tolerate it. So you need your own clear alternative, like the IT professionals, like the doctors. So there's a couple ideas about what this might be. And I'm just making these up. So think of these is just four instances. You might imagine, however, throughout your day, you have a couple of things. you have a cluster of 15-minute blocks that are available in a scheduling tool.

You can use something like Callenly or Schedule once, but, you know, spend the money. Look, you're a lawyer, you're making money, your firm has money. Spend money to white-label it to make it look nice, to be at your URL, not like it looks like you're using some free Internet tool. So there's these clusters of 15-minute blocks at various points throughout the day. And one setup could be, look, if you need to talk to me about something, I'm here for you, go on, grab a block of time, and I will call you.

Just put your number in there and we'll talk. And if you need more time, grab a couple blocks in a row. And you don't have to then be interrupted leading up to these periods. When you lead up to these periods, when you get there,

you say, hey, has anything been booked? Great, let me do those calls. And if not, that's just more time for you to work. Another approach, we'll say we're going to throw a little bit more money at it. Have a dedicated assistant. Like, this could be an assistant

that serves the whole team, right, the whole contract law team, not just you in particular, you know, particular. And they are an always accessible point of contact, just like nurses at your doctor's office. The client can call. I've got this big question. You're like, they can kind of triage this, right? Like, okay, so you have a question. It's urgent. You need a response. Great. We will, let me get the details from you. When are you available? Let me get your number. Great.

You know, I'll have, we'll call you back. We'll get you a call back a little bit later today or something like this. Or let's, I'm going to put a media on the books right now. I, you know, I have the calendar here. Let's get you on the books right now to make sure that we can talk about it. But there's someone they can talk to immediately and it's off their plate. But this assistant can, of course, then take care of a lot of stuff on their own,

book stuff on your behalf for you, come to you, you know, and batch, here's five or six things, what are your answers for? They can, so they're not interrupting you in the flow. So that could work really well. Or you could even have a much more simpler office hours set up, right? You explain this to your clients. I'm billing you in seven minute,

increments. Trust me, you don't want me answering other clients' emails while I'm working on your work because it's going to slow down how long it takes me to your work and it's going to cost you more money. But here are these office hours at the beginning of the day, around lunchtime, and at the end of the day, and I'm not doing billing work there. So my phone is on call me. You always know that you're only a couple hours away from an officer.

So if you don't want to use like a meeting scheduling tool or an assistant, you can even have a simple rule. Will they rebel? Will they say I'm going to another law firm? dare you? For the most part, no. Maybe 5%. But that 5% is worth it because fundamentally your job as a lawyer is to use all of this hard-won expertise that is stored as latent value in your brain and apply it to

add new value to information. You're doing legal work as high-level, elite-level knowledge work. If you have to be in a state of context shifting to answer emails as they come in, this significantly reduces your cognitive capacity, which means the instance. into your briefs, the quality of your work, the time it takes you to do your work, all of that is being reduced. It makes you a worse lawyer. So better for 5% of your clients to be annoyed and you are a 50% better lawyer than to keep

the small fraction of really annoying clients that demand accessibility happy and be a much worse lawyer. Net, net, it's better to be a better lawyer. You'll be a better lawyer if you're not contact shifting. But you know what? Clarity trumps accessibility. People will be a lot less mad than you think. if they can trust an alternative.

Don't be super fiddly about this. People get annoyed if they think you're being way too systems oriented. You know, like, here's what I want you to do is I have this web survey that you fill out and then you automatically get mailed, a microphone that you record your question on, and then a carrier pigeon comes. You strap it onto the carrier pigeon. They're like, come on. I'm important.

I'm paying you a lot of money. Give me a break. But if it's simple and clear, people will, for the most part, be on board and it's worth it. All right, let's do a systems question now. Hey, Cal, this is Ron, a music industry professional in New York City. Super pumped you decided to start the podcast and can't thank you enough for taking the time to do so. My question for you today is regarding your systems and how you track them. I took a productivity course from or meet Zadieh, a few years back, and in his interview with you,

the two of you shared the philosophy of how outcomes in your life are basically the results of processes. You even went on to say that you have a folder in Google Docs titled Systems of Various Systems in Your Professional and Personal Life. You even mentioned that you're always adjusting these systems. and even have a whole system just for adjusting the systems. So I was always curious if you could provide a few examples of how you create these systems, track them, and how often you might adjust them. Now, full disclosure, I have not had a chance to read a world without email just yet. So if the answer to my question lies in there, feel free to direct me to the book.

Thanks. Well, I'm never going to miss an opportunity to direct someone to read a world without email. So yes, you should read that book. But actually, the answer to this question, the specific question, The specific question is not in that book, so I will give you an answer now, but you really should still read it. First of all, that's cool that you're taking some of Rameet's courses. I've known Rameet for a very long time, I think over 15 years now. His courses are really the best in the business, so good for you for taking one.

I don't, however, actually remember the particular interview that I did with him that you're referencing. So I'm not quite sure what I said in that course, but I can tell you about what I do right now with respect to my system. So I'm loading up a web browser as I talk to you here. So I have my core directory. And in my core directory, I have my values document. I have a strategic plan for my working life. I have my strategic plan for my life outside of work.

And I have a document in here that is called core systems that run my life. last updated March 17th. So let me load this up. I don't have much in here. It fits in one page. All right. So let's go through what I have in this, in this sort of key to my systems.

I have a section here about my value plan. And I talk about how I keep track of my values in a value document. Okay. I then have a section here about my career and personal strategic plans. That's where I lay out the commitment that I have one plan for each of these two parts of my lives

that lay out my current thoughts, experimental systems, and plans for living true to my value. So that's the first two things in this core systems that run my life document is here are the documents, a value plan, strategic plans. Then I have a section called maintenance. And the maintenance section talks about how do I upkeep those three documents? And I say, you know, hey, I review the values about once a week and build a value plan for the week ahead.

It gives me particular things to work on. I review my strategic plans once a week, preferably when doing my weekly plan. And maintenance, I talk about my idea and notebook. So I keep ideas for those strategic plans. And the moleskin I always have with me. And that when I do big updates of those strategic plans, this is when I really go through that notebook.

Those things are written right here. All right. So that first section, what talks about my value plan, my strategic plans, and how I maintain them is labeled core documents. The next section is labeled productivity. These are the productivity systems that I run my life by.

Very straightforward what I have listed here. Weekly planning, daily planning. When I do my weekly plan, you look at the strategic plan. Work shutdowns, full capture. That's it. Those are the ideas I have on a productivity that I always fall back on and I always follow. And then there's a final section here on discipline. I keep a list of metrics in my personal life strategic plan that I track every day in my time block planner.

these are metrics that are intended. I call my core disciplines. It keep me doing regularly the things that I actually think are important or making progress or showing some sort of attention to all the areas I feel that are important in my life. All right, that's it. Now, of course, way more complicated stuff happens in my life, but a lot of the more complicated stuff shows up as experimental systems within my strategic plan. So in my key here to all of my systems, it says you check those strategic plans every week and you do what they say. It's a more complicated productivity ideas or plans or temporary plans or systems or rules can show up in those strategic plans. But this one document, core systems that run my life, has the foundation.

So in theory, if I really forgot how my life runs, I could go to this document and I would say, okay, here's my core documents in my life and how I maintain this. them. Here's my main productivity systems. Here's my my disciplines I track. Boom, I'd be back on track. I almost never check this. I update this when I change things in my life. I don't forget these things because I do them every day, but I do like having them written down. So one page, one document in a core directory, high level of summary of all the things on which I structure my life. All right, let's do a more philosophical question here about productivity going too far. Hello, Cal, this is Andres from Mexico. I've been a huge fan of your ideas for a while now, and I'm really happy with the results so far. This has allowed me to lead a more productive life, but strangely enough, it has also made me more strict when it comes to enjoying hobbies and activities unrelated to my work. And I wonder if there is a point where productivity, or the idea of it, could actually become counterproductive. Thanks to the techniques and principles that you share, I'm usually able to finish my work. responsibilities before the weekend arrives. This leaves me with enough time to focus on family,

hobbies, and personal projects during the weekends. And I really like this, but sometimes I wonder if I should be doing something more productive than what I'm actually doing. This happens even when I'm doing something I highly enjoy, like being with family or watching my favorite sport or a really good show on TV. My question to you is, is there a point where pursuing productivity can actually become counterproductive? Should I plan my weekends and my leisure activities? How can I get rid of the feeling of wanting to be constantly productive so I can actually enjoy my free time?

Well, when it comes to productivity outside of work, I think we do deal with things a little bit differently. I mean, certainly there's some principles that carry over. Full capture is an example. If you were keeping track of household admin or personal admin just in your mind, oh yeah, I got to clean the gutters. I forgot about that. I need to call the school about this early dismissal that I need to set up for next week.

If you're just keeping track of that in your head, that is a source of anxiety. That's not great. You want systems to keep track of those tasks. You want regular times in which you review those tasks. I typically recommend reviewing your household or personal non-work task when you do your normal professional weekly plan. So during the workday while you're doing that weekly plan, so that you can remind yourself of what's going on this week that I got to get done. And just like you might do with your weekly plan, some of these things that you want to put on your calendar, put on your calendar right then.

This is when I'm calling the school. This is when I'm calling to gutter company. If there's particular tasks you want to be sure to get to during the week, but you don't have a particular time you want to plan and put them in your business weekly plan. So you'll see them every morning when you're looking at your weekly plan to build your work plan. Because this whole notion of tasks should be captured. I should not be keeping track of them in my head. I should trust that I will see what needs to get done. You're going to get benefits from that in your non-work life

just like you get those benefits during your work life. But when it comes to actually taking control of your time, as you've probably heard me say before, I don't recommend time block planning every minute of your time outside of work. I think it's good to have a rough plan for your evening, to have a rough plan for your weekend to have some intention. What do I want to do with this time? and then once you have a rough plan,

do your best to be present for each of those aspects of the plan. Notice, however, having intention for what to do with your time outside of work does not mean maximizing the amount of things you get done with your time outside of work. Those are two different things. You may be very intentional about the fact that, you know,

I'm going to take 20 minutes to take care of these five urgent things that need to happen to get them off of my head because the entire rest of the evening, I want to have no household admin to do. I just want to go to baseball practice with my son and then watch a movie when we get home and just I need that unwinding. I'm exhausted. That's an incredibly intentional decision. And it's a decision that it has nothing to do with trying to maximize what you accomplish. On the other hand, maybe you're feeling bored, you're feeling listless.

You want to really lean into a project or a couple projects you're doing outside of work. and you want that challenge, you want to burn off some frustrations about some things that are happening in work, you have some extra energy, maybe it's a physical project, and you want to get some fresh air. And so your intention in that case might be very quote unquote productive in the sense that you're producing lots of stuff with this time. And that's fine too. The point is what you should be doing with your time outside of work is having a say, do not let it just unfold. and that could happen in a lot of ways. It could just unfold into a type of, I don't know, inactive sloth that's not really hitting the things that matter to you.

You're watching TV and looking at your phone instead of what you really should have done was, you know, hike out to this field and spend the evening out there, reading a book, right? Or whatever, right? So you don't want to just unfold like that. You also don't want to follow it like it sounds like you do sometimes. And it's just a generic optimization mindset

of could I be doing more, could I have been doing more, you know, you come out of work with this, like hit my goals, make use of my time, and you have that same mindset. That might not be great either, right? So you want to have some say in what you're doing with your time, and you want to have some rationale behind what you decide. All right, so let's pull those two threads together. You need to do full capture. You need to look at your task. You need to do weekly planning for your non-work week when you do your work week planning. tasks should go onto your calendar, tasks should go into your professional weekly plans. Stay on top of the little things.

That's a huge source of stress that you don't want to have to magnify by being haphazard. But for the rest of your time outside of work, make a plan as the evening begins. Make a plan as the weekend begins. It doesn't have to be super detailed. It doesn't have to be time blocked. But just get a sense of what you want to do.

Be intentional. Keep in mind that intentionality has complete orthogonality to optimization. And then just be present with whatever you decide. All right, I hope you find that useful. This podcast is sponsored by Blinkist. As you've heard me say before, ideas are power, and the best source of good ideas are books. The problem, of course, is figuring out which books are worth your time.

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You can get up to 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 and is not available on their regular website. So 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.com slash deep to fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. Let's do a question here. Oh, here's an interesting one about Benjamin Franklin. Hi, Cal. I was delighted to hear you review the Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. I view Franklin as one of the most inspiring deep thinkers, besides being the

opposite of a snobby Harvard grad student. I'm referring to the fact that while his dad didn't let him attend Harvard, Franklin went on to intellectually own all his schoolmates who did, and also wrote hilarious disses of Harvard in poor Richard's Almanette. For interested readers, I recommend the Isaacson biography and, of course, Franklin's own autobiography. But one lesser-known Franklin, book connects the dots between your ideas in fascinating ways. And that's Benjamin Franklin and his gods by Carrie Walters, who interrogates the argument that Franklin was polytheistic. This reminded me of your past references to Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, which encourages us to channel Homeric polytheism to find awe and meaning in forces greater than ourselves.

I guess I'm submitting not so much a question, but rather a request for you to share your thoughts on this through line. Just some musings during my sabbatical, which I'm spending partly in Franklin's haunt of Passy France. Thanks. Well, I got to say this is a great sabbatical question. It has a bunch of different musings and ideas enthusiastically connected and delivered. So this is definitely a question coming from someone who is doing their sabbatical right. So a professor right now who is not on sabbatical, I very much appreciate this style of question. Let me just touch base briefly. Before I get to the core of your question, let me touch base briefly on, first of all, when I talked about this book. So if you're a recent listener, you might wonder, when was Cal talking about the Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, that book by Gordon Wood? I would have talked about this, I'm assuming, back in July. Every July, I read a public-facing scholarly work on the American colonial period, and that was the book I read last July. So she's probably behind this. our question asker here is probably behind on the podcast library is referring to a podcast from July.

So just if you're wondering, when did I talk about that book? It was back then. Second, I want to briefly talk about this notion of Franklin dissing Harvard because I also enjoy this. You know, Franklin was in Boston before he came to Philadelphia. Other people in his milieu there in Boston who went to Harvard got a very different training than Franklin's largely autodidactic education. If you went to Harvard, let's say you're a John Adam style character, and you go to Harvard, one of the things you were going to learn back then, we're talking about the 18th century,

one of the things you were going to learn back then was the classics, all these great classical references, you were going to learn more sophisticated theology, all these theological references, you were going to speak Greek, you're going to speak Latin, you were going to read the Greek and Latin classics in the original language, and then when you emerged into the world and probably would become, say, a minister or become a lawyer,

and then eventually maybe a statesman, what you would do is give these big speeches in which you would show off that education by making all of these references to Cato over here and to Solomon over here and Aristotle. And this is what the height of educated discourse was. if you're a Harvard man the 18th century

was showing how many things you could reference and it's funny if you get into the history of John Adams this is what you see is that he was afflicted with this and Abigail among others kind of pushed him to say stop just trying to show off and actually worry about the thoughts themselves don't get caught

in the self-referential self-congratulations of your rhetoric and you know create the Constitution for Massachusetts and help create the Declaration and the Pindent and help keep the Constitution but seeing John Adams go through that evolution indicated what the typical Harvard educated person was like

if we're going to paint with a broad brush and of course Franklin didn't go to Harvard self-educated did not give speeches that were self-righteously and self-congratulatoryly referential to all these great figures from the past and etc. But what he did become was

among other things that one of the greatest scientists in the world completely innovated our understanding of electricity. laid the foundation for the modern understanding of electricity. Did this all on his own. I brought my two older boys to the Franklin

Institute in Philadelphia a couple months ago. We looked at some of this original equipment that either Franklin used or his contemporary used at that time. And he, as our question asker, hinted, dominated a lot of his Harvard educated peers who could properly

reference Cicero in their speeches, but didn't invent a lightning rod. This, of course, is entertaining on its own, especially as someone who went to an Ivy Lee school that's not Harvard. I really do like to see people poke fun at Harvard

every once in a while. So well done, Franklin. It reminds me a little bit now, and I think this is a rough analogy, but it reminds me a little bit now of some of this sort of faux, world-weary, exasperated, over-educated critique reflex that you see on social media, where

there's a lot of people with a lot too much education that basically spend their time trying to bring up the most sophisticated attack to undermine something that, let's say, people are getting excited about. I wonder if that's the modern equivalent of properly citing Cicero or Cato in your speech, because that indicates, I learned Latin, I read this, I understand it, I'm referencing it, I'm learned, be impressed.

And sort of the modern version of that, one of the modern versions of that, maybe, is not let me quote Cicero in a smart way, but let me quote, quote, or, you know, Adirno in a smart way and trying to undermine why. Well, you were kind of excited about this, but let me point out this flaw

that you weren't smart enough to understand. The fact that I understand these sort of junior year culture anthropology style theories means that I'm smarter than you. I don't know. Look, this might be a rough analogy. That's just something that came to my mind,

though. That there's the sort of the Franklin's out there inventing the lightning rod, and then there's the sort of John Adams's friends out there that are at point pointing out, well, you know, here's the issue with lightning rods.

And that's our modern equivalent of let me talk about Cicero. All right, but let me attempt to get to the core of your question here. So you draw a line between Franklin's potential polytheism and Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining. A book I really enjoy, I talk about it at some length in deep work. and in that book they talk about how in different historical periods, if you understand the culture of those times, in particular the spiritual culture of those times, there was a sacredness that was just injected into your day-to-day existence. And for the Homeric Greeks, which is what you reference, for example, there was this notion that this understanding that the pantheon of gods, these gods would actually inhabit your body. basically. They would put you into these moods that you would be, you know, when you were feeling the blood lust of war that Ares was actually inhabiting your body or when you felt the throes of lust that whatever that Greek god was, Eros maybe, I suppose, was inhabiting you. So it was like really a world in which you could, there's these gods that could just come in and completely give you this myasma of feeling and mood. And then they talk about the medieval period and you have this Dante S. structuring of the whole world and there was a meaning,

everything was impregnated with various well-structured meanings, et cetera, et cetera. And they make it up to the modern period and say all that's ripped away. And in a world without the sacred, it can be pretty dry. And we have to try to find our own ways of reclaiming that, right? So it's a really good book, really good arguments. As I talk about in deep work, they ultimately point towards craft as one place in which we can regain some sense of the sacred because craft forces you to. to come across values that are not just self-created.

Because you are working with the world itself, trying to wrestle from the grips of the forces of nature, an outcome that you desire. And if this wood is good wood for making a wheel, that is a property that your subjective assessment means nothing. It either is to write wood or it's not, and therefore you can find some sort of anchors for value that's not just created in your head.

Like, that's the whole program of that book. And so I guess the through line you're making here is the polytheism, the potential polytheism of Franklin, would be him seeing these different injections of the sacred or sort of spiritual energy into different parts of his existence. That's kind of a cool connection. I like, I mean, I guess where I'll leave this is we could all probably use some more transcendent awe

in our lives. some more experiences in which we just get lost in appreciation for something we understand well. Whether we want to call this craftsmanship, whether we want to call this beistic inhabitation, whatever we want to call this, I think it is important. And Franklin seemed to be someone with a big energy,

a real productivity, but also a sort of generous excitement about life. And so maybe he was tapping into this multi- varied sources of excitement and awe and energy in different parts of his life. And I think that's not a bad goal to go towards. And if I can bring this back circularly

to my off-the-cuff critique before, maybe the first step towards this is let's leave let's leave the non-sacred muck that is social media, where any approach of excitement or energy,

any approach to really get into something or find joy in something or to be lost in something just keeps being undermined, undermined by those proverbial modern Harvard men who want to point out that they've learned how to promulatize things when they were in college. And so get away from social media, take a page out of Franklin's book. You don't have to invent a lightning rod, but feel okay just getting lost in appreciation or off. Now, this is a completely sabbatical-style answer to a sabbatical-style question.

I'm not even quite sure what it is I just said there, but I had a lot of fun connecting a lot of random dots. And let's just think about this as being my tribute to the wonders that is a sabbatical. All right, let me come back to ground here. And here is a question from an academic, much more concrete about how to delegate research work when your work does not require large labs. Hi, Cal. I'm Maya, and I'm an assistant professor at an R1 university.

My question is about how to think about delegation and mentoring in the context of trying to maximize my own deep work time. Because my research is in theoretical statistics, there's little administrative work to delegate, like the logistics of running experimental studies. So in principle, I don't actually need of a lab populated with lots of students and staff. I've so far been a bit hesitant to add people to my lab, favoring instead solo deep work time that has proven highly productive and also enjoyable. If I did add students in postdocs, I could potentially delegate certain easier projects to them, but at the significant cost of decreasing my own deep work time

and increasing time spent in meetings, writing grants to support these people's salaries, etc. Well, I'm in a similar situation. My research is largely theoretical. I solve theorems. I don't build systems. I don't evaluate systems. And because of that, I don't, for example, need large labs in my work. I don't do work that requires four or five people, a couple postdocs with six or seven grad students under them to actually make my research go.

So it's a very similar situation to you. And I feel similarly about it. I do not want to create a large lab. just for the sake of creating a large lab, because the overhead on that is extensive. The grant overhead, the management overhead, and just the supervisional overhead of that is really large. So for someone like us, who is in our situation, doing theoretical work at an R1 institution, the real point of supervising students is sort of part of your scholarly contribution,

that you are creating new experts in your field, you're creating new scholars that can learn from what you learn that you're helping nurturing and releasing out into the wild, as it were, new thinkers who can help the world of ideas expand. So you think about it maybe less about, from a productivity perspective, what will I be able to delegate, what time will I be able to save? That's not the right question to ask, because if you're doing theory work, it will be a net loss in your time to do research to be supervising someone. The small amount of delegation, et cetera, they can do really should be far outweighed

by the time you need to invest in supervising and mentoring these students, especially if you're doing it right. So you need to think about it probably more from a service perspective, a service to your university, service to your community. And of course, if you're an assistant professor, mentorship is expected as part of your promotion criteria as well. So with that in mind, I think it's completely fine to have a small group. You want to not have a empty group because you want to do your part to help scholars, but there's no reason to have a big group. This is what I largely do.

I try to keep a steady state of one student, roughly speaking. Sometimes there's more. I'll have a postdoc, and there'll be maybe a period in between students where I have none. It might last for a year. But I like to keep about one student. So I'm always supervising someone. I always have someone I'm working with.

I always have someone that I'm training and they're helping me, and it's a really good relationship. But I'm unlikely to have three or four students, because then that becomes much more time. that becomes much more grant writing, etc. So I'm basically trying to give you some psychological cover here. I think it's completely fine for you to keep a small group. That's not an issue.

So long as you're meeting the expectation that your university has for student mentorship, focus on a small number of students that you can really mentor well. Do not stress for a second that you don't have a large group. If your research doesn't need it, there is no reason to actually invest that effort. All right, let's work in one more question here. This one is from a doctor. Hi, Cal. My name is Rachel, and I'm a physician scientist by training who is just completing residency in internal medicine. I'm writing you with a question about burnout and discerning the sources of it as well as taking the first steps towards solution. So my situation is that after a year and a half of very intense clinical training and the height of the front line of the pandemic,

I am for the first time in my life finding myself apathetic about my career and about beginning any major efforts towards moving it forward. This is totally new for me. I'm someone who in the past I have found great joy and fulfillment as well as passion in working deeply on hard projects. And right now the idea of diving into yet another stage of a hard project is at best something I feel empathetic towards and at worst something I feel downright resentful. of. I have been looking at some of the things that you've written about burnout and this kind of emotional state around work, including some of your older work on deep burnout for students, as well as the recent podcast with Brad Stolberg. And I'm wondering, I think this is for me somewhat multifactorial, and I'm not sure where to begin. I'm hoping you might be able to give some advice

on how to start discerning the sources of the burnout and where to start in actually bringing it to a close. Thank you. Well, I'm glad to hear that you were diving back into some of my older work on burnout and students. That's certainly where I first began encountering these issues on a regular basis. I used to write blog post about what I called deep procrastination, which was the state that students would get into, especially at elite schools like MIT or Harvard that was near where I was when I was doing a lot of this writing. It's a state they would get into where they basically lost their will to do their school,

work. They had been known for this their entire life. They had crushed it in high school. They'd gotten to these good schools. They were really getting after it at these good schools. And at some point, the switch would flick and they would say, I can't do it. I can't study for this test. I can't write this paper. And I work with a lot of students who were suffering from this type of burnout. And my theory, again, this is just my theory. But after spending some time with enough of these students, often what was going on here was a combination of two things. things. So A, it was some sort of heightened external source of exhaustion, right? So something that was unusually difficult. So for these students who would often be, they took too many majors, they

signed up for too many classes, they signed up for too many organizations and clubs, and it was kind of possible at first, but then a bunch of things come to a head together. And so just a physical load of what they were being asked to do became very exhausting and very difficult. So there's a physical exhaustion component. And then this was then connected with a motivational system mismatch. So they would

feel as if the locus of control on the spectrum of motivation was much more towards the extrinsic and much less towards the intrinsic. They would say, man, I have been on this path for so long because it's just what my parents thought, it's what they celebrated.

There's nothing better than to be a graduate from MIT or something like this. And so it really feels like someone else was putting me on this path. And now this path is very exhausting. That combination, I feel like there's extrinsic control of what I'm doing, combined with over-the-top exhaustion would create this acute burnout where I just can't do work. Like the brain system would be like, enough. What's going on here? Probably something like this is going on with you, right? So you have this incredible source of over- the top exhaustion, which is being a frontline medical practitioner during the pandemic, right?

So like with our MIT students, when they're triple major, finally catches up with them. Like, this is incredibly physically exhausting. And then at the other hand, you have the training process for medicine has all of these extrinsic feels to it, right? Like, there's all these hoops you have to jump through and you have to stay up late during your residency and you have to do these really hard boards. And a lot of it feels like you're just trying to prove to people that you can take a of physical pain and get through it.

And maybe you forgot why you even wanted to get into medicine in the first place because, again, that's one of those fields where everyone in your life is like, yes, definitely do this. We're so proud of you for doing it. And so you have a lot of this extrinsic, extrinsic control going on as well. So boom, that is a rich recipe for, I just can't do this anymore. When you understand that those are the two ingredients for this style of burnout, now we can get a little bit more specific about how do we accommodate that. So let's look at both of those factors and think through a solution here.

So the factor of just over-the-top exhaustion and being a frontline medical practitioner in the pandemic, what we need to do there is basically get a break or greatly reduce those stresses. Let's actually reduce that strong sense of overload, that strong sense of exhaustion. If you are at a transition point in your training to take time off right now would make a lot of sense. Because what you are doing is you are reducing those stressors. When those stressors are in place, you have the recipe for this type of burnout.

So why don't we let that stress clear out of our body? Let's go down to a limited clinical shift. Let's do, you know, even take time completely off if that's what we need to do. Lower that sense of exhausting stressors. This is not you giving up or being weak. It's you completely hacking your motivational systems in a way that is completely psychologically and physiologically sound. All right, now let's look at this other issue.

The extrinsic control factors in medical training. Oh, man, I can't believe I have to get up and do this and then go study for this. And I just, I'm done with going through these other hoops. So what can we do there? Well, I think this might be a good time. Once you reduce those stressors to return internally to a lifestyle-centric career planning exercise where you think through what are the elements I want in my life five, ten years from now? What do I want my life to be like?

In terms of time and in terms of what I'm doing and what my work is like and the impact that has, but what I'm doing outside of work, how I'm embedded in my community, what else is happening, where do I live, what type of place do I live, what type of pace is going on, what's my lifestyle like, what's my house like, really think these things through. And solidify through reflection, a very aspirational picture of a fully-fledged lifestyle picture, professional, non-professional, community, health, everything, spiritually everything, that you really come to buy into. This is mine.

This is no one else's. This is no one else saying you should do this. This is no one else saying you have to study for 13 days to take a test for this. It's just you deciding. Now, you've done a lot of training for medicine, so I'm going to suggest that medical training should be involved in this almost certainly, right, but on your own terms. And it could be what you end up with here. the image you end up with here is something that is going to require quite a bit of intense training,

but it's part of an image you have. Once you've reduced the stressors, once you have this lifestyle-centric career planning exercise done, and you really believe in this vision is your vision for what you want to do for your life, then you can work backwards and say, okay, I've reduced the physical exhaustion, I've recommitted to a vision of what I want my life to be like. Here is the role that medicine plays and that here is what that requires. I'm going to have to do this type of training, get this type of certification, do this type of fellowship. Okay, now let's get back to it. But now you're getting back to it under your own terms. You're getting back to it as part of your efforts to implement a lifestyle that you feel like is the right thing for you and that you're

excited about. When you do this exercise, it may lead to a drastic change. So maybe, you know, you were, you were, you know, you did med school and they graduated you early to go into the front line. You haven't even done your residency yet. And your original thought was like, look, I want to do what it takes to be in neurosurgery or this or that. And there's 15 more years. Have you got residency in fellowships and all this type of stuff? And you're like, okay, I just, I was just doing that because that seemed like the most prestigious thing.

Maybe I'm going to do a three-year residency here at this school that's going to be whatever and then have a small town clinical practice. Or maybe it's like, no, I want to be, you know, pediatric he monk is, this is what I want to do. I want to be at a children's hospital. I want to make a difference in kids' lives and their parents' lives. And all right, so it's going to be some training. You know, I've got a pretty long residency. I'm probably going to have to do a fellowship.

But I know why. I know why. And I'm being pretty intentional about where I do it and where I want to live and what type of hospital I'm going to tame. And if this is the type of place I want to work, how good of a school do I need, how good of a match do I need here and how prestigious of a fellowship? Why don't I take a year off between this and this? And, you know, you're thinking things through. You're thinking things through. This is a pretty consistent recipe.

reduce the immediate stressors that's causing the exhaustion. Once that is reduced, once you can catch your breath, figure out from scratch what you want with your life. Feel it in your bones. This is what you want. Then figure out, okay, so then what does that require and how can I smartly execute the things that are required in a way that's not going to completely overwhelm?

If you need to take more time, take more time, put a gap between things. Don't do the most prestigious program. That's all great. You're doing these things completely on your own terms. You are going to find that training. you're going to find that the certification, you're going to find those late night,

you know, naps on the medical bed in the supply closet during your hospital residency. It's going to be a lot better when you're doing it on those terms. The only caveat I want to quickly give here, and this is something that showed up when I worked with students,

there was another thing that would cause what would look like deep procrastination. That would be clinical depression. It's a different thing and a serious thing. In clinical depression, you need to work, obviously, with someone who is an expert in dealing with depression. So the way you can tell the difference, I guess,

and I'm not a slight, you know, like this is not my specialty. So for God's sake, takes everything I'm saying here with a huge grain of salt. If you're in clinical depression, you're going to feel an extreme a hedonic reaction. Like nothing in life gives you pleasure. You can't imagine something giving you pleasure or enjoyment, and it becomes a sort of crushing grayness. That requires expert intervention.

Often the students I was dealing with that were suffering this academic deep procrastination, they were still excited about many things in the world, in their life, and if anything, it was this excitement for other things that was making them more resentful towards the grind they were going through in their schoolwork. So that's a key differentiation. So if you feel that crushing a hedonic grayness, that's something going on in your brain that's much different. Then I really am looking forward to go.

going to the beach, but hate, dread the idea of going back to my hospital. Now you're in the type of deep procrastination range that I was just talking about. So let's just put that key caveat there at the end because I think that is a critical, that is a critical caveat. You know, any type of suicidal ideation, any type of self-harm ideation, despair about any variety beyond just despair and do I really want to do this job. That's the depression red flags. get your professional right away,

completely dealable. But just like if I hurt my knee, I'm going to go to a orthopedist. If your brain gets there, you want to go to a brain expert. But if it really is just your career, I'm tired of this medical thing. I'm exhausted.

That would be my prescription, if you will tolerate me in a punish fashion using that term. All right. And the prescription for myself, self-prescribing here is wrapping up this episode. Thank you everyone who submitted their listener calls. I'll be back on Monday with a full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

And until then, as always, stay deep.