Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 138: LISTENER CALLS: How I Read So Much

Episode Date: October 14, 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. - Interacting with potential clients while avoiding constant distraction. [2:10] - Self-promotion without social media. [8:21] - Dealing with an overflowing "to read" folder. [13:19] - Correcting weekly plan drift. [18:13] - The secrets of my high-volume reading. [22:47] - Personal vs. organizational productivity. [27:29] - Balancing deep and shallow work. [36:10]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This podcast is sponsored by Optimize, a subscription service founded by my longtime friend Brian Johnson, designed to help you make your life deeper by putting into action some of the best insights from the ancients all the way to modern science. When you subscribe to Optimize, you get access to over 600 philosopher notes. These are six-page book summaries of the most impactful, nonfiction books ever written. Every summary written by Brian Johnson himself. I have had multiple of my books summarized as a philosopher notes,

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you will get 10% off on your subscription if you stick with the service. 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 138. Once again, just as in Monday's episode, I am podcasting dressed up much nicer than I normally am when I come to the studio here in the DeepWork HQ. Last time it's because I had a TV appearance.

time it's because I was doing a conference appearance. This virtual appearance I was doing was for a conference that had 11,000 virtual participants. That's a new high for me. That's a lot of people. And here's what I've learned. When you have 11,000 participants, you can't just fire up Zoom and send out a link. And so the technology that goes into these massive live streaming virtual events is actually quite impressive. So I think I really enjoyed being able to see that from the other side. No quick announcements today. I'll tell you what I am going to do. I am going to do an advertisement for myself. I want to do an advertisement for my time block planner. If you are new to this show, you probably hear me talk about daily time block planning all

the time as a critical element of organizing your work life. Well, I have a planner designed to do exactly that. It's called the time block planner. Go to timeblock planner.com to learn all about it, how it works, how the planning system works, how the planner works. We've sold tens and thousands of these. There's a lot of people using them right now. And I thought it might be worth mentioning it for all of our new listeners. So if you hear us talk about time blocking, there is no need for you to scratch your head any longer. Go to timeblockplanner.com to find out more about how you can use my custom. design planner. All right, that's it for preamble. Let's get right into our listener calls.

Hello, Cal. I really enjoyed your book, A World About Email, and also your other book, Deep Work. I took both processes from them and applied them to my agency, and now we successfully don't use email, instant messaging, and do four-hour blocks of deep work every day. The main thing I'm trying to solve at the moment is I'm about to start a big sales campaign. from the agency. And that requires me to be on LinkedIn for a good part of the day, sending messages back and forth. Now, I don't really want to get into a hyper, hive mind kind of mentality where I'm applying to people constantly at every waking hour of my day, but also sometimes these sales messages are a bit time sensitive, and I need to make

sure that I'm active in the conversation. Well, first of all, your agency sounds amazing. No, email, no instant messenger, four-hour deep work blocks every day. For all of the listeners out there who feel as if a world without email is impossible, let this particular example push back on that belief. It is possible to run an organization without constant distraction. The ideas in a world without email can work. All right, so that is the context in which you are asking what is a common question. There is a particular type of interaction you need to do with the outside world.

People who unfortunately for them maybe have not yet read a world without email, they don't know about the hyperactive hive mind. There is a need, in other words, to have more back and forth rapid ad hoc communication in order to interact with these people in the outside world. My general solution for these type of situations is figure out the protocol you're going to use. Don't just fall to a default. I don't know. They might expect a quick answer. I guess I have to be on LinkedIn all the day. Don't fall to a default.

Say, what are we trying to do here? Who are we trying to talk to? How are we trying to target them? What need do we have for interactivity? What role does that play? What problem does it solve? How much interactivity do we need? Let's figure that all out.

now that we have all of these cards laid out on the table, we can step back and say, how do we want to implement a protocol for dealing with all of these constraints? When you come at it fresh like this, like the team in Apollo 13 at Mission Control that puts all those parts on the table and say, look, we have to come away with a CO2 air scrubber that can fit into the limb ports for their CO2 scrubbers.

We have to make it work with these pieces. a lot of innovation can happen. So what we need to do here is whatever the LinkedIn sales communication equivalent is of saving a bunch of astronauts. So let me just throw out some hypotheticals. I don't know much about what you mean by a LinkedIn sales campaign. So these truly are hypotheticals. But imagine, for example, that the way you have it worked out is there is shifts that people take throughout the day where they are the designated LinkedIn watcher. So it's not just you. Maybe it's you, Maybe it's you who is initiating communication, but maybe you have multiple people who are watching this, who have shifts.

To ensure that if a question comes back, you get a quick like, hey, great, I'm glad you're interested. This is, you know, Mark over here at the agency, and let me give you a couple answers. And so they always get answers very quickly from different people from the agency, right, and not just one person. Again, just a hypothetical. Two, maybe there is a 30-minute shift here, there, and over there each day that you do the LinkedIn. 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m. So no one's really that far in a workday from getting a response from you. It might not be immediate, but it'll be within a couple hours. And you have these clear shifts. If I was doing that and I was you, I would use a separate machine for that, just psychologically speaking.

Here is a tablet I go on to or an old laptop or I go to this computer over in this. design studio, and I literally go to a different place and a different machine, and there it is bookmarked. I go right to the LinkedIn and do LinkedIn stuff for a half hour, then completely leave that context and go back to my other day. You're not intermixing it. It's not, this is something I'm doing in the background, constantly context shifting and paying that price. So that's another hypothetical solution. All right, here's one more. You have a really clear off ramp from the LinkedIn discussion into a higher value-producing interactive discussion.

Glad you're interested or if you're interested in this, like here's a page, grab a slot, let's talk. You know, like I'm standing by, here's whatever, a schedule wants page that has these client intake windows where people can grab some time to talk with you and you're out there and you're almost immediately pushing people towards that where they can have a much higher quality interaction with you back and forth real time and the need for you to keep checking and having an asynchronous back and forth is diminished. Again, I don't know anything about LinkedIn sales campaign, but maybe this is an advantage.

Having to have these conversations drag out with messages that are asynchronous, and then they have to go back and check and wait until you respond, and then they respond as kind of being dragged up. Maybe people would appreciate. Yeah, grab a time, let's chat. And then they can click a couple links, do whatever, and it's done. Or, you know, look, if you want to hire someone to do that for them, so they don't even have to click on a screen. You have one of your assistants in the firm, one of the administrative assistants that's like, let's get into it. I'll go back and forth with you and figure it out at your leisure. Be creative.

All right. So again, the details of what I'm suggesting don't matter. The general structure does. Figure out what actually are the constraints here. What do you have to do? Why do you have to do it that way? And then come up with a protocol that will meet those constraints more or less without requiring constant context shifting on your behalf. All right.

Let's move on to our next question. I can deal here with a perennial topic here on the Deep Questions podcast. How can I market myself if I'm not using social media? So, hi, Cal. First, I want to thank you for all your great advice. I've been listening to your podcast since the beginning, and it had uttered my thinking and productivity incredibly. My name is Ais, and my name actually comes from a great Spartan king.

I am a Greek Cypriot residing in Cyprus with my wife and daughter of seven months. I am a litigator at a law office and I am 20 years old. Following your advice, I gave up social media on the summer of 2019 and never look back. So my question to you is, I have been focusing on primarily making myself better and trying each day to learn as much and practice go to the best of my abilities. I often find myself thinking that I do not need any kind of marketing or advertising for myself, as my work can speak for itself. I also publish a law-related article each month through the firm, should you think that this is useful. But in today's world, I am afraid that it's not enough. How can a young lawyer, like me,

focus on law and at the same time create a brand for himself? Having in mind that one day, I want to head my own law firm. Thank you. Well, this is a good question because I get a lot of different variations of it. And this is what I can tell you about your situation. When we look down the line and you are starting your own law firm and there are those potential big clients that are thinking, do I want to sign with this new firm, do I want to sign with this lawyer, is this who I want to trust with the legal protection of my company or my family?

I can tell you that probably the primary thing they're going to be asking is, have I seen this guy on TikTok before. Because if your follower count is not substantial on TikTok, I don't know that I can trust you as having a sufficiently well-developed enough brand for you to do my contract

law. So we got to get you on TikTok. We got to get you some good light so those videos look good. Let's roll. It would be funny if I moved almost all of my content production to TikTok. Ah, so you're wondering about the impact of

rapid cognitive context shifts on your knowledge worker retention and production rates? Well, I could tell you about that, but why I tell you about it when I could dance about it? And the lights would come on and I would do some sort of complicated dance. I think I would be a lot more popular, to be honest. But in your case, okay, let's get to the case at hand. Talented young litigator, quit social media. Already I'm proud. Already I'm excited.

You're wondering, what else should you be doing to improve your brand in your field of elite level cognitive work, litigation, lawyer litigation. The best thing you can do is be so good they can't ignore you. What I mean about that is, A, of course, deliver on the cases you're doing now, but continue to find a specialty within your field, to sharpen your skills, to be a leader in your area, in your firm, in your country on that topic that you bring it. You're young, you have energy. I don't know how you're 20 and a lawyer. I don't understand how it works in Greece. It's a whole different system. It's probably just because you were named after a Spartan king and they're like, forget the law school thing. Here's a sword. Do what you want. Get after being very good at what you do. I think the fact that you're writing law articles, that's great because that's going to help you probably sharpen your skills as well and get exposed to new things. But honestly, in that field, do what you do really well. Try to avoid context shifting while you're working. That's my only hack for you. I know you bill in seven minute increments in law, but don't switch back and forth between email and your law.

Batch one thing at a time. You'll get a lot more done with the time you have. But just be excellent at your job. If you're excellent, everyone will want you. Firms will want to hire you. Your current firm will want to promote you. Clients will want to come work for you when you start your own firm. This is the nice thing about law.

Is that there is very well-established paths to success to identify in the rewarding talent with both, monetary means or with more autonomy or freedom to start your own firm and be successful. These are very well-entrenched paths that are all built along demonstrable talent at the type of law you practice. None of that changed in the last 10 years because the introduction of social media. So stay off social media. Don't worry about that stuff. Keep producing and getting better. If you're already at your age, you're not on social media, thinking really critically about

this writing law review articles, I think you're going to do fine. So be so good they can't ignore you, and the options will come. If that fails, pranks on TikTok. All right, let's move on here, a question about academic paper reading. Hi, Dr. Neaport. I'm a researcher at a university in the U.S. When I'm working on a research paper, say trying to find specific information and evidence in the literature, I come across papers that I think could be very important to read. But at that very moment of trying to get my work done, I often don't have time to read the entire paper.

So I put it into my Read This Week folder. Yet the papers pile up and this habit is becoming nothing different than stamp collecting. Well, first of all, I love that terminology, stamp collecting. As a general phrase to describe when a productivity system gets focused on the collection but not the actual organization and execution of work, that it becomes a glorified stamp collecting hobby, that's a great phrase. I think I might start using that in some of my discussion. Now, the specific issue you're talking about with academic papers is a really good one to ask about because it's a really common one. my stance on this, which I've talked about before on the show, is that reading academic papers in most fields is very hard and very time consuming. We have to treat that with the respect it deserves, so we should not expect that our future selves are going to be able to consume and properly understand a really large volume of esoterically collected papers that all seemed interesting to us at some point.

In the moment, that sounds good, but it's almost always impossible long term to actually keep up with all of that work. So my advice is usually to tie academic paper reading to much more concrete motivators and structure. And so the things I talk about is, A, first and foremost, tying paper reading to a particular research project you're working on. So I'm reading this paper right now because I need to understand it to write this section of this paper. Or I'm designing this experiment and I need to understand what so-and-so did and these people did because I need to at least speak to their techniques or maybe borrow their techniques. So I'm reading this as incredibly directed. My motivation is incredibly directed. I need this paper right now to work on this paper I'm doing.

Another structure for academic paper reading that works well is the reading group. You know, okay, here's a group of people. We're working on this topic. and we're taking turns presenting a paper each week so that once every three or four weeks I'm reading a paper deeply and the other weeks I'm learning

about papers that other people read there's, of course, a whole social pressure there to read, and you're distributing the reading load to other people. So for the same amount of effort, you're getting knowledge of, you're getting knowledge of more papers. I mean, honestly, I think those should be

the two primary drivers of paper reading that you do. Beyond that, yeah, it's great. If you read papers beyond that just because it looks interesting or it might be interesting to you. It's just that I wouldn't have high expectations that a lot of papers are going to get read in that way,

and I wouldn't be down on myself if they don't. The Two-read folder or the Read This Week folder makes a lot of sense on paper, but it turns out not to be a great way to actually read papers. It's just, again, this is so hard, we have to have much stronger motivation or much stronger structure. So reading for a support a paper you're working on right now or reading as part of a collaborative reading group,

I think that's probably a better way to go about getting through those literatures. One other hack you can throw in there, and this really depends on your field. But in computer science, for example, a lot of our work is published in conferences, competitive peer-reviewed conferences, where you actually go and attend in person.

A lot of people, including myself, have a habit of, okay, I'm here for three days. You know, I'm somewhere exotic. There's one of the conferences in my field is going on this week in Freiburg, Germany, and there's one coming up in Salerno. So wherever, you go to the conference. When you're there, you might read a lot of papers because you're seeing the talk. Like, oh, I just saw this guy talk about this paper.

I just saw this woman talk about that paper. This is really interesting. Let me read it right now and actually go talk to the person about it. So that's the other place where I do a lot of reading is when I'm at a conference. And I'm just in that mindset of I'm here just to learn. and to come up with ideas, talk with my collaborators about ideas, learn about new ideas, and maybe I'm reading a lot of papers there. That's a reading mindset.

Putting that aside, though, again, directing your reading towards much more concrete targets or having much more concrete structure around that reading, like reading groups, I think you're going to have a lot more success. So don't beat yourself up about the two read folder getting overfilled. That's basically to be expected. This podcast is sponsored by Magic Spoon. As you've heard me say before, when I was growing up, one of my favorite escapes was being able to eat that chigory treat cereal that really seemed to define the 1980s.

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All right, we got one here about losing the thread of your weekly plan. Hey, Cal, this is Eric, and I'm an investor. The productivity issue I'm facing is, you know, I've got my daily plan. and I would say I start off the week really well with it. I do it for a day, do it for two days, feel really good. And then, you know, by the middle or the end of the week, I just lose my spot and I forget about it. And it really kind of puts a stall on my momentum.

It's almost like a mental block where I know it's good for me. I know I should be doing it. but for some reason I just can't get it going. So can you help me with this? Thank you. This is a common issue. I call it weekly plan drift. And it's when your actual week begins to drift the way from the plan that is laid out in that weekly plan document.

There's two solutions to it. One is sometimes the issue is inadequate weekly plans themselves. So if the plan is too optimistic or it's not properly engaging with the reality of your schedule in the week ahead, the drift can happen because your brain is basically noting this is not a useful path form anymore. I got to go do my own thing. The idea is on here. It's too much work. We don't have enough time.

It's underestimating how much time we're going to be transiting between these meetings and the emails are going to have to keep up on and my energy levels. And so we're done with this plan. We're going to do our own thing. So inadequate weekly plans will often create drift. The solutions to get better at weekly planning. Really look at the reality of how much stuff do I have this day. What's the cognitive cost going to be of switching back and forth between these things rapidly? Am I going to be exhausted by the afternoon?

Does it really makes, am I going to be able to push hard, you know, three afternoons in a row on this writing project or do I need time off? So sometimes it's just making your plan better, which usually means. more lax, more realistic. The other solution here is to have a two-stage weekly plan. So you plan the first two days or three days, depending on when your drift happens in pretty good detail, and then you have some pointers or notes about the second half. And then halfway through your week,

you build the plan for the second half. So you're always dealing with a fresh plan. That hack works pretty well. If you're going to deploy that hack, and I've deployed it before, usually in the context of, like, right now in this fall where I'm teaching on Mondays and Wednesdays because it's almost as if Wednesday afternoon through Friday is a separate week. It's a week of on-campus obligation, whereas Monday through Wednesday is a week of on-campus obligation. And sometimes I'll just plan on Monday morning. My Monday through Wednesday is very much focused on my courses and my prom sets and dealing with my students and committees. and then I take a breather and now let me plan for Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday, and maybe focus on deeper concerns.

So that's when I often fall back to that strategy. Something I think works well here is to take a break at this midpoint. It's like, okay, I'm going to end my day on Wednesday at 2 p.m. I'm going to make my plan for the rest of the week and just chill out and let my mind unload and relax and get my head of steam back up so that I can hit the running Thursday fresh. Obviously, a lot of positions won't really let you do this, but if you have some autonomy and you're an investor, so you probably do, you will end up better off. Yeah, you lose some, quote, unquote, productive hours Wednesday afternoon, but by beginning

to just reset and recharge, you can really kill it on Thursday and Friday because you have a brand new plan that you're coming at fresh and you're looking at those days fresh, and you're going to get more out of those days than if you instead just have a weekly plan drift that happens around Wednesday and you end up reactively bouncing back and forth between email and web surfing black holes on those Thursdays and Friday. So you might try that as well, two phase weekly plan, if possible, end the day early after your second phase weekly plan to give yourself a chance to reset and make that next day feel like another Monday.

All right, let's shift from the world of work here to the world outside of work and tackle a question about my reading volumes. Hello, Cal. I'm Andy, and I wanted to ask you about your reading process. Can you describe the reading process? You do. An amount of six books in June seems impossible to me. Do you speed read or skim books? Or do you skip chapters in non-fiction books? Do you only read what seems interesting in a book, or do you read the whole book? You know, I've been getting a lot of questions about my habit of reading five plus books a month, and I'll tell you, yes, I read the whole book, no, I don't speed read, no, I don't skim.

I would say the foundation on my strategy is that I put in more time into reading than most people do. Now, the reality is the amount of time you have to put in the reading to become a high volume reader is less than people guess. But at the same time, when people estimate how much time they are actually reading themselves, often it turns out to be a lot less than they realize. So we have both of those forces going on at the same time. I figure if you can average about an hour of reading most days, that's enough. I mean, in an hour of reading, most books, you can get through at least 50 pages.

So for talking about, let's say, an academic press book, 160 pages. Look, that's a three-day thing that book is done. Let's say you have a normal, normal-sized non-fiction idea book, 250 pages. Okay, you know, that's a work week. And that book is done. So now let's say you're mixing sort of normal length books with some shorter academic press books and then maybe one longer book and one book that you're listening to on tape during your morning walks and commutes.

And so that knocks off another book. It's not that hard to really get the five. So I try to hit an hour most days, and then sometimes I'll do more. You know, if I'm really going on a really long book, I'll try to find extra time to get reading in. The key is just making reading your default activity. People say, well, I don't have empty hours in my day. Well, neither do I. But the time I'm reading is time that I think other people would be looking at their phone.

We're looking at their tablet or watching TV. For me, I just make it a default activity. You know, I'm up a little early Waiting for the kids to get up, I'm going to read Eating lunch, I'm going to read Done with work, kids are playing outside, What am I doing while I'm trying to keep a side eye on them out of the yard? I'm reading.

For bed, I'm reading. It's not my turn to do bedtime. Why don't I sit down and, you know, my nice big leather chair and read? Like, it just becomes your, this is what I want to do. If you make it your default, you will aggregate up to that hour without any type of radical change to your schedule, and that's going to get you really far. And then occasionally you put aside more time. I've definitely been there before where I'm working on a big book and I want to make progress and, you know, whatever.

The book's coming with me to the Little League game. I'm going to schedule some time to read in my day on my time block planner, et cetera. So sometimes I'll add an extra time. But the right mix of books and the right mindset, you'd be surprised by how much you can get done. I'll tell you who I learned that from was Ryan Holiday. So I was asking Ryan Holiday, how do you read so many books? I subscribe to his reading list email where he talks every week or month I should say about, oh, here's some books I read and what I thought about him.

And there was always five or six books on there. And I was wondering, how do you read so much? And I asked him in one of the interviews on my podcast, I forgot which one. And he was like, I don't know. It's not a big deal. I just try to put aside time to reading. and I was like, well, how much you read every day to get this done is like half your day? And he said, no, it's about an hour a day.

You know, I read at night after the kids are in bed and try to get some done during the day. And at first I was incredulous. What do you mean an hour a day? You have all of these books you read. But guess what? It adds up. So that's how you would do high volume reading. I don't necessarily think everyone needs to do it.

But it's a pretty good cognitive exercise, especially if you're trying to wean yourself off of, let's say, phone pseudo-addiction. You're looking at your phone too much. It's giving you anxiety. and when you try to get away from your phone, you don't know what to do with yourself instead, so you come back to the phone to fill that existential void. If you're in that situation, a high volume reading habit could be exactly what you need

because it gives you a default to go back to, and you have a goal you're trying to hit. I want to get five books this month that motivates you to go to that goal, and it could be really useful if deployed in that particular context. Also, you just get exposed to a lot of cool ideas. All right, let's go back to a question here about the value of just-in-time messaging.

Hello, Cal. My name is Mark, and I'm a software help desk engineer from Massachusetts. I'm a big fan of your work. It's reduced the feeling I get of being like Sisyphus, repeatedly rolling a boulder up a hill, only to have it come crashing back down over and over in attempts to accomplish something. My question is about a topic you touch on in your book,

a world without email on page 14, whether organizations might benefit from some, quote, just in time, unquote messaging. In particular, I'm wondering whether you have any suggestions for measuring both individual and organizational productivity as a result of implementing your suggestions. While I'm convinced that individual productivity increases with your advice, I would also like to measure that plus any decrease that would take into account delays in the just-in-time messaging that individual focus would bring. Well, I appreciate the Greek mythology reference, though I would say in this particular episode you have been trumped by the actual Greek litigator with a name that comes from a Spartan king,

but this is a good runner-up. But let me respond to your question with a follow-up question. why are you differentiating between personal productivity and organizational productivity? And in more detail, why are you putting these at odds with each other? You seem to have set up a dialectic in which you could either serve quote unquote personal productivity or you can serve the productivity of the organization and these are at odds and you have to figure out some balance between the two. Let me just say looking at this objectively, that doesn't really make sense. all there is is organizational productivity.

Here is a bunch of brains that have been brought together, investments have been made into them to add value to information. That is knowledge work. All things being equal, the more value produced for a given fixed input, so a given collection of brains, the more precisely speaking productive that organization is. So the only relevant question is really how do we get the best return on investment for this attention capital and do so in a way that is, of course, sustainable and satisfying for the people involved so that they don't leave because that's also, of course, a big hit as well. So we've got to find a way to work that is sustainable and also produces the most value in the end. That's the only question that matters. So this idea that somehow the individual is at odds with the organization when it comes to productivity, doesn't really make sense if we look at it objectively.

All right, so this is our question. What is the best way to actually hook up these human brains together and have them collaborate and add value to information? And, okay, you know, this is where you have to start looking at your work, breaking it down into its individual constituent processes and saying, how do we want to implement each of these? Here's a particular type of thing that happens that we do regularly. Where does the information come? How do we store the information? How do we figure out who's going to work on it? How do we communicate about what needs to get done?

Where does that happen? What does the information go when we're done? These questions have to be asked and answered about each of the processes in your business. Now, when you're asking and answering these questions, there's a couple things that you want to prioritize. One, of course, getting the work done at a high level of quality within the time constraints that are necessitated by the work at hand. If we're talking about responses to client crises, there's probably a pretty tight time. constraint that any successful process will have to satisfy, for example. And when it comes to that question of quality, how do we implement this process in a way that

produces things at a high level of quality? That's where you have to start caring about things such as context shifts. If the process requires lots of context shifts, because perhaps you're working things out with the use your term just in time messaging, you're going to have to check those inboxes all the time. Brains are going to have to keep shifting contexts from the inbox back to their work. all the time significantly reduce

the quality of stuff produced by that brain and the rate at which it can produce it. So that's where you start worrying about, okay, is there a way to get a, if we want to get a high quality result here, can we implement this process in such a way that minimizes, let's say unscheduled messages

that require responses? And that's kind of the whole game. And you know what? In some of these instances, you'll say this particular process, I don't know, it's rare when it comes up, but when it comes up, it requires really quick responses

and really the best way to implement this is that we use the phones and we ring them and we interrupt you when it happens and you have to respond because if this client has suddenly been featured on the 6 o'clock news as being under investigation, we have 10 minutes to get to work. And so maybe there is a just in time messaging component to that process, but you can think it through. Like, okay, what communication tool do we use and how do we prevent this from creating or devolving into just general context shifting over all communication? think all of those things through. This approach, the approach that I lay out in a world without email, this approach of saying break your work down into its constituent processes and think intentionally and carefully about each, how do we implement this in such a way that we get the right quality work at the right, under the right time constraints? Think about these things logically. Be incredibly wary about the cost of context shifting in designing these processes and then do the best you can. that's what you do.

I think this is much more productive than a more general discussion that I hear a lot. Like deep work versus just in time messaging. I guess it's some sort of general setup. Like should we be a deep workplace or just in time messaging piece? And depending on what side you're on, you can say, I can think of a scenario in which we need quick communication. So forget everything. Let's just go back and be on Slack. Or there's a certain thing I do that requires concentration.

So forget you, you know, I'm shutting down my email forever, right? Like, that's not a useful frame talking about it so generally is not a useful frame. Or throwing specific case studies at the, I hear this a lot. Well, here's a particular case in which this would be a problem. That's not a super useful frame. The useful frame for figuring out how to actually be productive in the precise economic sense in the 21st century knowledge sector is to break down work in the processes and think each through intentionally. How do I satisfy time constraints and maintain? quality with context shifting being one of the biggest variables that you should be wary of.

Go through this exercise. I'll tell you what you'll probably find that if you're very worried about contact shifting, most processes can be implemented without any type of highly interruptive communication. And the processes that do require it, if any, when you're being this intentional, you can really minimize the negative footprint. So instead of saying because there's this one thing that happens in our company, that requires quick responses. So let's all just be on Slack about everything.

If instead of doing that, you say there's this one thing we need in our company that requires quick responses, and we have built a communication tool or are using communication tool just for these type of emergencies. So it will absolutely get our attention when we need it, but there's nothing else on there anytime else. You're solving the problem, minimizing the negative footprint. And by the way, that tool for most people is the telephone. Hey, for this emergency type of thing that happens, we'll call. And once every few weeks you get a phone call. And it works and you get a quick answer.

And you can't just sit. You can't check your phone in the sense of like, did someone call every six minutes in the way you can an email or Slack account? And so, you know, spoiler alert, that's usually the solution for the rare number of processes that require alacrity in responses is usually you just use the phone and it barely ever happens. All right, so let's stop doing general debates about, you know, is deep work good or bad? It's just in time messaging good or bad.

And let's start thinking about processes. Process, process, process, process. How and why, how and why, how and why, for all the different things to make up your work. And if you know what it is, you're trying to achieve and you have an appropriate level of concern and distaste about context shifting, you will end up in a much better place. All right. I think we have time for one more question. Speaking of this tension between deep and shallow work, this question gets to it from a more personal angle. Hello, my name is Jimmy, and I currently work as a what my title is called a pension analyst, which is sort of a clerical and administrative position where I do admin and clerical work on behalf of our pensioners.

The current productivity issue that I'm facing is that I'm having trouble balancing the deep work and the shallow work. necessary to advance my career. I read your book deep work, and I know that I need to block off like lengthy chunks of time to be able to focus deeply and learn new skills quickly that can help boost my career by utilizing the more complex skills that we can learn. However, I do actually need to work on applying for jobs, and that entails a lot of shallow work. you know, submitting job applications. That's really just analog stuff.

Paying attention to my email for notifications from recruiters for interviews and using LinkedIn extensively to network with different people in my field. So how do I balance, or in the field I want to go to. So how do I balance learning in, like, how do I balance the deep work and the shallower necessary for career advancement? Well, this is exciting because we have a question here. here from a Cal Newport newbie, someone who is fortunate enough to not yet have been hit over the head week after week with my philosophies on how you actually organize one's professional

efforts. So I will give you the short version, because I've gone over this a lot of times on the show before, but I love having an excuse to give the short version of my organizational philosophy. what you need to be doing is controlling your time with intention. Figuring out what you're trying to do and when you were going to do it, if you approach your day from the perspective of what do I want to do next, you are going to get significantly less done, and you are going to see a bias towards the immediate and away from the important but non-urgent, which ultimately will over time compound to really negatively affect your career.

So how do you gain this control and intention over your time? You start with a quarterly plan. This is what I am working on this quarter where I want to get this quarter, what I'm trying to improve this quarter. You might want to have at the top of this plan a longer term vision for your career so that you can ensure that your quarterly plan doesn't just keep the proverbial lights on but are moving you towards where you want to get. Each week you look at that quarterly plan when you write what I call.

a weekly plan. I'm looking at the days of the week. I'm looking at things that are already on my calendar for this week. I'm looking at deadlines. I'm looking at my quarterly plan, so I have the big picture in mind. What am I doing this week? What's happening Monday? What's happening Tuesday?

Is Friday the quietest day of the week? Then I'm going to wait until Friday to work on this. Is Wednesday incredibly busy? Well, let me make sure that I take advantage of that first hour of the day before the first meeting to knock through a bunch of these tasks that I know are going to get done. You're looking at the whole picture for your week and sketching out how this week is going to unfold. Then when you get to each day, you don't just say, open up my inbox and rock and roll. You build a plan for your time.

And the right technique there, I believe, is time block planning. You give every minute of your workday a job. And then when you're done, you clearly shut down. This is where my time block planner can help if you want to understand more. More about time blocking, go to timeblockplanner.com. I have a video where I walk through how time blocking works. So you're with intention from the big vision down to the plan for the next hour. You are operating with some intention about what to actually do with your time.

You take this approach, you will discover, oh, I can quote unquote balance many different competing concerns. Maybe not on the scale of each day in the sense that every day I work on my client, client administrative work, my personal deep work training, and my disallow work involved with trying to get a new job. But on the scale of weeks and months, everything is getting worked at. Everything is getting pushed. So multi-scale planning is usually the key to obtaining some sort of balance. The only other thing I want to throw at you here is be wary of excuses to put yourself into a consistent state of distraction. We've heard this and other questions,

even in just today's episode. It's very tempting to say, here is something that's going on in my professional life that I need to monitor. And I will use that as an excuse to basically have LinkedIn or an email inbox

always open. Once you've done that, you have lost the day. This is the core idea in my new book, A World Without Email. There is a, massive cognitive cost to shifting your attention from one target to another. Every time you glance at LinkedIn, every time you glance at an inbox, you initiate one of these shifts.

You've just cost yourself 20 minutes of reduced cognitive capacity. You do this enough time in the morning. You're going to shave about three or four hours off your afternoon that you just can't do anything cognitively demanding distracted or not because you fatigue your mind so much. So I get a little bit nervous when I hear like I heard in your answer, well, I have to have email open because recruiters could send me notification. I call shenanigans on that. If you checked your email once a day for recruiter notifications, you would be fine. There is not going to be a situation in which the recruiter said, you didn't get back to me in 45 minutes.

The job is not yours. That is not how job hiring goes. I do not buy that excuse. Now, what about the LinkedIn? And I'm trying to interact with people on LinkedIn. Again, no one is going to say, I enjoy talking. with you and I thought about hiring you, but the thing is, is you're not on LinkedIn enough. You know, what I'm really looking for in someone I'm hiring is someone who responds very quickly

on LinkedIn all day long. No one wants that. No one is on LinkedIn that much. No one expects that from you. Put aside a half hour midday, a half hour later in the day if you need to to check in on LinkedIn conversations. You will be fine. By the way, I would go sanity check that talking to people on LinkedIn is really the key source of networking to find your next job anyways. my limited understanding of LinkedIn is that that type of networking support is not a general unsolicited ongoing conversation thing

so much as it is LinkedIn's ability to search your secondary and tertiary networks for contacts relevant to a company you care about. I've heard about that. Does anyone I know know someone who works for Google? Great. Let me reach out to that person to set up a phone call so I can learn about Google. That's a great use of LinkedIn,

but this idea that you just need to be generally on there and talking to people and that this is somehow productive networking. I don't know if I buy that either. So I'm calling partial shenanigans on that too. So again, don't look for excuses to not have to focus. Don't look for excuses to avoid structure in your day. Direct your time and attention with intention. And there's a lot of different things you can get done. There's a lot of different goals you can accomplish. There's a lot of progress you can make towards the things you care about. So quarterly, weekly, daily time block, stick with the blocks, fear context shifts. You're new to this. So this is pretty exciting because

I think if you actually try all this advice, it is going to be a hair raising game changer. Send me a note interesting at calnewport.com if you go through some of these transitions because I love to hear about people's experience when they are brand new to these type of ideas. But we, however, are not brand new to this episode because we've been going for a little while, so I will wrap it up. I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.