Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 139: Am I Good at Time Management or Just Lazy?

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Will Offices Survive the Pandemic? [6:01]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do I practice my writing better? [22:07] - Is it harder to write a dissertation or a book? [25:08] - Will 10-minute sitting breaks destroy my concentration? [29:04] - Am I good at time management or just lazy? [35:52] - How do I get the most out of an assistant who handles my inbox? [40:24]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I structure all my leisure time when I have no kids? [44:13] - Is digital nomadism making a comeback? [46:53] - Are RSS feeds a good alternative to social media? [52:37] - How do I find fellow Deep Questions listeners to hang out with? [58:49]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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incredible skin care products for yourself, I have a special offer just for Deep Questions listeners. Go to www. Let'sdisco.com slash deep or enter deep at checkout for 30% off your first order. That's let's disco.com slash deep. or 30% off your first order. Thank you, Disco. I'm Cal Newport, and this is DeepQuestions, episode 139.

So once again, I'm opening an episode by noting that later this same day, I will be filming a TV appearance here from the Deep Work HQ. This time it's for a cable TV hit. The practical implication of this is, is that during the recording of today's podcast episode, I will be increasingly colder. It's one of the things I've discovered about my HQ is that when you shut the door to the studio,

as you want to do to isolate sound and keep ambient light from the hallway out of the studio, it gets hot. Not at first, but over time as you're in here and as you're talking, it gets hotter and hotter. And as a result, you end up getting more flushed looking. And it's not a great look for TV. And so what I have to do or what I'm going to try to do is make my office almost unbearably cold so that when I shut the door and things warm up, it warms up to just a reasonable level, which is all to say, one of the things that I most took for granted before the pandemic, and now do not, are the wonders of professional television and radio studios. I have spent a lot of time in very nice radio studios. The NPR has.

headquarters is not far from where I live. So I have done a fair number of NPR interviews out of those studios. I've done a fair number of TV interviews out of various studios, network studios, cable studios, et cetera. And you take for granted the amount of work that actually goes into just making that work. You can just show up. They throw on some makeup, another person clips a mic on, and it all just sort of works. And it looks good. And the lighting's nice. And the cameras work. And there's no hum happening mysteriously on the microphone. The temperature doesn't get out of control, the iPad that is being used as a second monitor doesn't start to just fritz random.

None of that happens. It just works. You take it for granted when you're there, but when you have to try to replicate all of this technology on your own in an office above a restaurant in a small town in Maryland, you realize, oh, it's really hard to get this all the function. So I no longer take for granted how smoothly running and how high quality the output is from professional studios. So how's that for a real relatable,

widely shared issue and observation? One quick announcement. I, in recent episodes, have messed up the timestamps in the episode description. This was my fault. I record the timestamps

as I record the episode. So as I record each question, I write down the timestamp at which I'm recording the question. Here's the thing, though. I recently shifted to more of a dynamic insertion approach for my ads. The ads get added to my episodes later by my sound editor Mark. Well, obviously, when you add ads later, the timestamps I wrote down before those

ads were recorded no longer makes sense. I forgot about that. A bunch of people wrote in. So I think we have a fix. And I think this episode should be fixed. If not this episode, next week's episodes, Mark is actually going to mark the timestamp's chapter markers or something like this. I'm not quite sure. But anyways, they automatically adjust as you add or take stuff away from the audio. As an end result, the timestamps that you

see in the description will be accurate. And as a bonus, because they reflect these MP3 chapter markers, if you use a podcast listener that is compatible with chapter markers, you'll be able to jump from question to question directly without having to just fast forward to specific timestamp. So there's sort of a bonus to this fix. Hopefully this episode is the first which is fixed. If not this episode, then next week's episodes should be functioning properly. So sorry for that. All right. So we've got a good collection of questions to answer today. But I think first, why don't we do a quick deep dive? So the question I want to dive deeply into today is whether in-person work will survive the pandemic.

It's definitely a topic that's on a lot of people's mind. As knowledge workers writ large spent at least some time working remotely, there's a non-trivial number of office workers that are still, believe it or not, working 100% remotely. And this generated a lot of questions about what is the impact of this unexpected but grand scale experiment on the world of office work. Well, I made a prediction about this in May of 2020. In May of 2020, I wrote the first of many articles I ended up writing for the New Yorker about the pandemic and its influence on things like work and technology.

And I wrote this article on about remote work, one of the early articles that got into the history of remote work. I'm proud to say it was one of the first articles early in the pandemic to talk about the ascendancy of remote work that had happened. in the early 2000s that then tailed off in 2011. And so there had been this big moment and it failed. And this idea that we need to understand why it failed before is probably important to understand its role right now. I really feel like I helped inject that narrative into the discussion. But in that article, critical to this deep dive, I had a prediction. I said, most offices organized their work using the hyperactive hive mind, informal back and forth ad hoc messaging.

if you move entirely remote, the hyperactive hive mind is going to get more hyperactive. When you get rid of the friction-producing productivity heuristics that are emergently present in the office, the ability to grab someone in the hallway and take care of a discussion in two minutes instead of tin back-and-forth emails, to have that extra conversation before and after in-person meetings, to be able to see the overwork or harriedness of someone. in their face as they walk through the hallway, therefore making you think twice about dropping something else on their plate. To have an actual time and social capital cost to setting up a meeting because now it's not just a disembodied electronic invite. You actually have to reserve a conference room and people have to walk over there and they look at you and said, you made me come here. I hope this is important. All of these things act as a governor on all the back and forth ad hoc communication that happens in a hyperactive hive mine shop. and I said if we go completely remote, those governors are going to dissipate and we're going to get more hyperactive to the point where it'll become a huge pain.

Communication will be almost all we do. That was my prediction. The second part of my prediction is this might be just what the remote work revolution needs. Because the only way to dissipate that pain is to move past the hyperactive hive and say, okay, uncle, we have to get way more structured about how we, organize our work, how we figure out who is working on what, how much should be on your plate, when and how we talk about the work that's on your plate. We've got to get real structured about this because this is just getting out of control and we're all just at home and all on Slack channels and all on Zoom. And as a side effect, as I elaborated in some future articles, once you have

a alternative to the hyperactive hive mind that's more structured, remote work is much more feasible. It works much better. It's much more sustainable. So I said, look, this temporary pain that we're going to all feel over the next six months or so, is going to hopefully induce a lot of innovation. To cure that pain, we're going to lay the foundation for a whole new way of working. I was one half right. Flipside of that is I was one half wrong. So I was one half right that, yes, moving most offices online made the hyperactive

hive mind more hyperactive. The amount of communication between email, Slack, and Zoom got out of control. I kept hearing from listeners who would report, all I do all day is go from Zoom to Zoom to Zoom while doing email and Slack in the background. I'm literally worried about when I'm going to have time to go to the bathroom. It became, as I'd like to say, like a Kafka play, the theater of the absurd, where we just talked about work in every minute without actually doing any work, right? So the pain point exactly as I predicted got intense.

The second half of my prediction, however, did not happen. It did not force most companies to say, okay, uncle, let's rethink how we work. Let's have sprints and task boards and stand up status meetings and greatly reduce what's on your plate but really organize how that work gets done. That didn't happen. What do we do instead? We took it. And the reason why we took it is because this pain was not happening in isolation. There were other pain points happening concurrently.

The pandemic in general made a lot of things terrible for a lot of people. amidst this background of Terribleness My kids are at home People I know are getting sick There's service hospitals being overwhelmed All this other terribleness that was going on The terribleness of the hyperactive hive mind

Getting going crazy Was just sort of lost in the noise We're like yeah We're in a bad time bad things are happening So there was no inducement to try to make changes If somehow We all had been forced to do remote work But nothing else bad was happening in our lives

I think we would have said, I don't tolerate this pain. Let's fix how we work. But with all this other bad stuff going on, we just weren't motivated to say this has to be solved. We really just didn't have the cycles. I mean, look, this is someone who published in the middle of the pandemic a book about rethinking how we organize work, a world without email. That book probably came out a year too soon because people just, they're not there. They weren't there.

Like, we're still in survival mode. We're not yet ready to build the new ship to get off the island. we're still trying to figure out how to open the coconut so that we don't die of dehydration, right? So this is the mindset we were in. All right. So my prediction is my new prediction. It was half right. So I make another prediction here.

It's enough to keep me going. My new prediction I've been making is if you don't fix these systemic problems, that is shifting from the hyperactive hive mind to more structured ways of work. If, like most offices, you don't make these changes and you are still remote right now because of violence. iris reasons, public health reasons, those offices will end up more or less in person within about six months to a year. Because it just doesn't work. Remote work doesn't work very well if you just say, here's a Zoom account, here's a Slack account, here's our policy about when you need to be in the office and not make it work.

The hyperactive hive mine is not very compatible with remote work. You have to fix how we work before we can change or fix where the work actually happens. So this is my prediction, has been weird. going to see a semi-rapidly decaying orbit that brings us back to the core planet of in-person work. It'll look a little bit different. It'll be, you know, Mondays and Fridays. You don't have to be here. But most of the, most of the value of remote work comes from the geographical separation from the region that you're in an office.

It's what allows you to live where you want to live to prioritize other parts of your life, to have significantly more freedom and how your work unfolds. when it's just Tuesdays and Thursdays or Mondays and Fridays, you don't have to be here. It doesn't change much. And you know what? Give it another six months and you come into those Tuesdays and Fridays anyways because it's just convenient because everyone else is there. So I think that these orbits, remote work orbits are going to decay if we don't fix, if we don't fix underlying how we're going to work. So does that mean this was yet again another period of potential ascendancy for remote work that's going to not pan out? well, not so sure if that's long-term going to be the case.

And the person who helped change my mind on this was a technology entrepreneur and remote work advocate named Chris Hurd, H-E-R-D. And I recently, a couple weeks ago, published an article in The New Yorker that was profiling Chris Hurd and his ideas. Now, Chris Hurd is someone who actually runs a company that helps companies work remotely. So obviously, he has a dog in this fight. But he's also become a big advocate for remote work on Twitter that's really catching a lot of people's attention. He has a very strident view.

Here is the theory he unfolded, the theory that I elaborate in that New Yorker article from a few weeks ago. He argued, here's what's going to happen. Like, yes, Cal, you might be right. In the short term, all these big companies that went, you know, fully remote, they will eventually reopen. Hey, by the way, this is as an aside. They probably should be open now. look at my most recent New Yorker article called When Will Offices Open? And it points out that the places where offices remain closed, there's really no reason for them to be closed.

And there's an issue. It's very ambiguous why they're closed. And it's more about executives trying to minimize headaches and not create a stir than it is trying to care about the too much about the safety. I have a whole thing about that. Read that article. But anyways, yeah. So when these offices reopened, yes, maybe we're going to, at first they'll say be in the office some days and not others. But it'll basically be glorified in person work.

is where we're going to fall back to. But Chris says, yes, but give it some more time. Give it some more time because here is in his theory where the seeds of change were really planted in the pandemic. The pandemic was not going to make Apple in January of 2022 be a fully remote company. They have a 12,000 person, you know, headquarters in Cooper Tino they just built. Here's what it really did. It got a bunch of startups to build themselves from the ground up. to not need an office.

Because when you're building your company from scratch, you can build the alternatives to the hyperactive hive mind from scratch because you're not trying to change the way people already work. You're not trying to impose new systems on people's existing approaches to work. You're building it from scratch. And Herd gave me examples. And I talked about some of them in my New Yorker pieces of companies that grew during the pandemic and they grew incredibly fast.

And they grew incredibly fast because they didn't need offices. And so they could pull talent from all over the world and they could hire this talent with less per person overhead costs because there was no long-term office lease with an expense that was scaling per head. So it's a competitive advantage. Access to more talent, lower overhead per talent. They could grow very fast, they get better talent,

they could keep that talent cheaper. His argument is the startups who started during the pandemic that built themselves to be what he called remote first from the ground up are going to have a competitive advantage. They're beating out their competitors, their startup competitors that are not remote first. All right, now the seed has been planted. These startups are going to grow.

And as they grow, they're going to develop and solidify the best practices about how do we organize work when we don't all work in the same building. They're going to solidify these alternatives to the hyperactive hive mine. Well, the talent from these companies that understand that help develop these new ways of working, Kurd argues, are going to migrate into larger and larger companies, probably in the tech sector at first. there'll be this vertical transfer of knowledge. And now you're going to have mid-sized companies saying, okay, we're not starting from scratch here and trying to move away from the hive mind

and make our operations perhaps less in person. We have here an expert from company X who helped them grow from eight people to 1,000 without an office. They really know what works and what doesn't. We've just hired them. Now we're not just saying, here's our new remote work policy. We're not just saying, here's Zoom, good luck. We actually have tested experience-based ways of overhauling how we work.

then the medium-sized companies are going to go remote. Hurd says the monopolies, the Facebooks, the apples, they might take a while before they go remote because the competitive advantage of broader access to talent, less overhead per person you hire, is less important when you're a monopoly, but eventually they will come around as well. That's vertical transfer.

The next part of this theory is that we're going to see this expertise surrounding how to run an office remotely without the hyperactive hive mind, transfer horizontally with the main, if you'll excuse the perhaps inappropriate metaphor here, the main viral vector is probably going to be private equity. If you think about the model of private equity, you need to try to acquire businesses and get a pretty quick efficiency boost so that you can get a return on your investment. So one way they're going to do that is they're going to hire away these experts from large tech companies that all they do is figure out how to make operations run remotely,

they're going to hire them away and say, we'll give you a lot of money, we'll make you rich, because here's what we're going to do. We're going to buy up a bunch of companies in this particular vertical in another sector, and we're going to make them all remote, and we have your expertise to figure out how to do it. And we make them all remote, we're going to get this immediate boost of profitability because we can get out of long-term offices least, and we're going to get this immediate boost in quality because our future hiring is going to be non-geographically bound. So we'll get a good return on these investments.

So then private equity is going to begin again seeding these ideas out. This is where you get to some sort of phase transition point where you look up and say there's tons of companies now of various sizes in various sectors that are pretty effectively operating remotely. And they're doing it because they have really smart alternatives to simply let's just jump on Zoom and jump on Slack and figure things out. So short term, yes. The companies that are still closed will open. They will be more or less in person. And again, I don't count maybe a day and a half a week you're at home as being remote because there's none of the advantages of remoteness. You get almost none of the advantages in that setup.

So they're going to go back to be mainly in person. Three or four years from now, though, I think the landscape's going to look different because of what happened today during the pandemic. Three or four years from now, I don't think there will be no offices. But I think there's going to be a non-trivial percentages of workers, much bigger than today, that have no permanent office in which they work. Won't be everyone and won't be every company. It's going to be a lot of companies. I think that that change is happening now.

We just don't realize it because when we look across the landscape now with big companies, we say, I don't know, they're all, they're coming back and they're giving some hybrid stuff to their employees, and the hybrid's going to stabilize and go away, and basically nothing really changed. I am now optimistic once again. Maybe I will eat my words just like I did with my prediction. back in May of 2020, but I think we have laid the seeds. The pandemic has laid the seeds for a non-trivial phase shift in where work happens. It's going to take about two or three years before the exponential growth here actually gets large

enough for us to see the effects of this work-style epidemic actually become visible broadly, but this is going to happen. So is in-person work a goner? not completely, but a lot more I would predict than it is right now. And you know what? This is good news. This is good news from a deep work perspective

because put aside remote or in person, the thing that enables remote work to work, the moving away from the hive mind and getting more structured about your work, regardless of where you execute your work, significantly reduces that culture of distraction. I think it's going to make work more satisfying. I think it's going to allow people to produce deeper,

more quality results. I think it's going to make people happier with their work. Putting aside all of the issues of location, just moving past the hive mine is going to be a huge boon to worker satisfaction and non-industrial productivity metrics in this country. So I think this ultimately is a good change. So there is a little dose of optimism for you right now. And let's hope this time I'm more than just 50% correct.

All right, that's enough about me talking about my ideas. Let's see what you're interested in me talking about. We'll do some questions now about deep work. Our first question comes from Sunita. Sunita asks, if you could not write for editing, what concrete deliberate practice steps could you take to improve your writing? So when Sunita says, write for editing, she's referencing my advice to people who are trying to improve their writing, which is don't just write on your own, like in a personal blog or a diary,

try to find places where you're writing for an editor. Someone that's going to push back on your article, maybe reject the piece if it's not good, polish the piece if it's close, that feedback is what really unlocks the power of deliberate practice. So what should you do, she asks, if you don't have that opportunity at the moment. There's no one to edit your writing. One thing I would recommend is doing exercises of style replication. So you take a particular article or essay or chapter of a style that you admire or is relevant to the type of writing you do, and study it and try to replicate that in your own writing. Can I get that pacing right? What about the structure? How are they using the words? Can I try to

write in a way that sounds like that writer? I used to do this when I was making my transition from a student advice book writer into a mainstream idea, hardbook, hardcover book writer, a transition I took very seriously and took me a few years. It was one of the exercises I did is I would break down articles primarily from the New Yorker and from the New York Times Magazine. I remember breaking down Malcolm Gladwell pieces from the New Yorker. I remember breaking down Clive Thompson pieces from New York Magazine, among others. And I would break down these pieces and try to understand them. Structurally, you know, what's the structure they would use?

Go from example into detail. What's the style they would use? What's going on with their sentences, et cetera. And then I would try to write my own pieces that would mimic those styles just as a way of building out my toolkit. So I thought that was very, that was very useful. And so it's something useful that I would often recommend. You know, who did this was Benjamin Franklin. As a young boy in Boston, apprenticing for his brother's print shop, one of the ways he taught himself to write was deconstructing the writing of writers he admired, then tried to reconstruct very similar pieces.

So he would try to learn and mimic those styles. He practiced. that mimicry more deliberately when he would write anonymously. He would write anonymous letters and essays for his brother's newspaper with characters such as Silence Do Good, each had a different style. So through mimicry, he was practicing great styles. And it paid off, right, because his writing ability really played a core role among other factors in Franklin's self-made rise from an apprentice to obviously someone of greater historical impact. So, Zaneda, practice mimicking other styles as a way of building your writer toolkit.

Our next question comes from South American in Europe. He says, hello, Cal, thanks so much for your books and podcasts. I have a question that may be helpful for other members of your audience. Could we please try to measure the effort that goes into finishing a PhD thesis and or a nonfiction book of the same length? For example, could you tell us, based on your experience, writing both types of pieces, how many articles did you read, how many hours did you write per day or per week, how long did you spend talking to other scientists going to conferences?

Thank you very much in advance. All right, that's an interesting question. Not only have I written a course, a PhD dissertation and my share of nonfiction books, maybe I'm in a unique position to answer this question because I'm one of the few people to do both of those things simultaneously. Yes, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation at MIT, I was simultaneously writing an unrelated nonfiction book. I was worried about being bored. You can't spend all day working on a dissertation. And when you're at an R1 research focus school like MIT, when you're writing your dissertation, they just leave you alone.

You have nothing else to do. And it leads to a lot of downtime. So I wrote a book at the same time. So if you want to look back in my canon, the book I was working on during my dissertation was how to become a high. school superstar. So definitely writing the book was more directly time-consuming than writing my dissertation. Coveat number one, in theoretical computer science, like a lot of mathematical fields, writing a dissertation is not necessarily the same thing as if you're in the humanities.

In the humanities, a dissertation is like a mini book where you're making for the first time an original argument that you're worried about whether or not it's going to hold. up or not to scrutiny. In something like theoretical computer science, by the time I was writing my dissertation, I had published many papers. And a lot of people in theoretical computer science will write what's known as a stapler thesis. So it's basically, here's three or four of my best papers. Let me fill in the details and add a big introduction. So you're stapling together papers you already wrote.

There's my dissertation. It's not a big deal, right? Like the work in a doctoral program for a sort of mathematical or theoretical computer science type program, the work is in establishing yourself as a productive research or pre-dissertation. And if you haven't, then it doesn't even matter if you write the dissertation or not. And if you have, then the dissertation is easy. I should have done a stapler thesis. I didn't.

I came up with an original idea for the thesis. But basically my thesis was just a glorified journal paper. So if I had to guess, you know, that's probably six months, maybe eight months of regular but not full day thinking to get the bulk of that dissertation together. compare that to a book. My experience with nonfiction books is there's a long preamble period where you're trying to figure out what you want to write about and that can take months. It can sometimes take years. And then once you have an idea, you write up a proposal and sell it, it usually takes about a year to write. And then there's an editing period that lasts another six months or so. And you're not working full time in that period. You know, you're waiting for

edits to come back and then you do edits and it goes back. But about six months where you're never you're never too far from working on a manuscript. And then after those six months, things get quiet for a while and then pick back up for publicity. But if we're trying to compare apples to apples here, in my field, writing nonfiction books takes more time, more total hours dedicated specifically to that book than it takes to write a dissertation. The number of hours dedicated specifically to a dissertation, I think, was less. It feels like a lesser lift. Again, this will differ by different fields. if you're in the humanities or some such,

a dissertation will probably feel pretty comparable to writing a nonfiction book, but that at least was my experience. We have an interesting question here from Ice Major. He says, are 10-minute breaks from sitting enough to destabilize deep work sessions? As he elaborates, you know,

he worries about sitting too long for health reasons and tries to take a 10-to-50-minute break from sitting every hour. Ice Major, not necessarily. So I have this notion I've written about on the blog before called deep breaks, which are breaks from work designed to minimize the context shifting cost. In other words, when you get back to the work you're doing before the break, you can get back to that work at as high a level as concentration as possible.

And the general rules to make a break deep is to avoid two types of distractions. those that are relevant and those that are arousing. So by relevant, that means do not expose yourself to related but not quite the same cognitive context. So if you're working on a work project, you're writing a report or something like this, don't look at your email inbox during your 10-minute sitting break because the email inbox is going to show you other work-related things. So sort of similar to what you're doing but not quite the same. It's going to create a lot of cognitive collisions and confusion that's going to make it harder to go back to that memo. The other thing to avoid are emotionally arousing distractions because that just fires up parts of your brain that are going to suppress or inhibit the parts that you already had activated for your work and make it harder to get back.

So don't, for example, go to social media. Obviously, a lot of social media right now is all about pushing buttons and creating emotion. It's the rat with the cocaine pellet dispenser experiment writ large and implemented digitally. So if you jump on the Twitter and look at the latest outrage, and that's going to make it very difficult for your brain to then switch back to the work you're doing. So what should you do for a deep break? Physical is good. Get up, walk, move.

That's a completely different part of your brain. It's not going to have a major impact on the part of your brain that was doing to work before the break. If you're going to expose yourself to content, make it content. it's neither relative nor emotionally arousing. So, for example, if you are working on a memo for your marketing company and you check out the latest article on last night's baseball game during a break, that's going to have a lot lower impact on your ability to get back to focus than if you looked at email instead. Or chatting with a colleague about something mundane, like the construction of the building that's happening next door, that's going to have a lot, a much reduced impact. packed and your ability to concentrate, then if, for example, you instead looked on Twitter and got really upset about something. So I like that you're not sitting. I like that you're getting up.

Hey, maybe do some quick intense exercise like my friend Brian Johnson does. He gets up every hour or so and will knock out pull-ups or knock out, you know, a thousand meters on his row. Or that's even better. Just avoid those relevant distractions, avoid those emotionally arousing distractions as well. This podcast is sponsored by Four Sigmaatic, a well- company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. For SigmaX mushroom coffee is real organic fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with lions main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. I like to drink this mushroom coffee right before each of my deep work sessions.

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All right, here's an interesting one from Eddie. Eddie asks, how do I know if I'm managing my time well or just don't have enough to do? Eddie elaborates, I have been using a combination of GTD and time blocking for many months. Time blocking has been especially helpful to me in structuring my day. A, recently I noticed that I have a lot more time available. My job responsibilities have not changed, so I attribute my newfound time to being an effective time blocker. Have you and others also experienced this? I'm happy to have more white space, but I'm feeling a bit guilty.

I might not have enough on my plate now. Well, Eddie, this is a good question. And, of course, for those who are listening who have heard the turn time blocking, but don't know a lot about it, go to timeblockplanner.com and watch my video that explains the whole concept so that we will be on the same page here. Eddie, what you are experiencing is quite common. When you get serious about allocating your time intentionally, you become typically a factor of 2x more efficient in the deployment of that time.

And what I mean by that is that if you fix a fixed amount of work, and you compare yourself before and after you get intentional about time allocation. So in the first experiment, we just kind of rock and roll, list reactive method, email, Slack, looking at to-do list, what should I do next? And compare that person. Let's call that scenario A. With someone who is doing full capture like you do with GTD and time blocking and maybe

multi-scale planning, so they're augmenting the time blocking with weekly planning, the weekly planning's influenced by quarterly planning. Let's call that scenario B. The person in scenario B will get that same amount of work done in roughly half the time. So what you are experiencing is quite normal for people who get quite serious about time management. So I don't feel bad about it. You're not lazy. You're not underworked.

You're actually just working smart in an environment where most other people aren't. So the question is what to do about it? And you have some options here. So like think about me. I'm incredibly intentional about my time and time allocation, a multi-scale planning, etc. obviously I put a lot of thought into that. And what have I done with it is I basically said, great, I'll now do three or four jobs instead of one in my same nine to five time.

That's one option. It's what enabled me to be a professor at the same time that I'm a writer, at the same time that I am a broadcaster. You know, I can fit this all in reasonable work hours because I'm being intentional about my time allocation. The other option is to say, don't penalize me employer. because I can get this work done a lot more effectively than everyone else. If you're not going to pay me more for being better at this work,

then maybe what I'm going to do is basically get the same amount of work done. The level of work done that is considered good, that's considered still better than my peers, and I'm going to get it done in half the time and use the rest of that time for something else. This is what we sometimes refer to on the show as a stealth part-time job. You have basically taken a full-time job and made it part-time implicitly by being more efficient about your time. And then you can dedicate that remaining time to other things that are important to you. Now, it could be, you know, a side project or building out a new business or a lifestyle business.

Sure, but it could also be completely personal. It could be you're, you know, volunteering heavily at something else. You're getting really into movies and you're spending more time at the local theater, that you're getting in really good shape, that you're building a structure in your backyard, whatever it is, that you're picking up a new athletic skill. You just give yourself some breathing room that you're applying to other things. You know, I think that's completely viable. There's a big ethical argument that we sometimes have about whether stealth part-time jobs are ethically sound.

And I tend to fall on the side that they are. The contract with your employer is that you are going to produce a certain reasonable level of work. and if you're producing work that it is within the range of other people with which you work, then in some sense the exact way that you structure that work, the exact amount of time it takes is immaterial. So that's your choice, Eddie. Take the newfound time to hustle something else or take the newfound time just to have some breathing room and to focus on some other parts, some other buckets in your deep life allocation. That's up to you, but the one thing you should not do is feel guilty.

I think we have time for one more work-related question, and this one comes from Errol. Errol says, I am an executive director of a mission-driven literary events nonprofit, and I hired an assistant director in 2019 who has helped so much by organizing a lot of information for me, so I don't spend all day an email. We are now looking to hire a joint administrative assistant to provide digest of hundreds of unsolicited and solicited email pitches we receive weekly regarding potential. authors to book in our space. Can you suggest some guardrails for how to empower an assistant enough for them to be valuable, but also make sure that we don't lose control of our very specific mission-based standards? All right, that's a good question. So in this particular instance, I would care a lot about the channel that these pitches are coming in.

What you don't want here is just a general email address. Certainly what you don't want here is an email address associated with your name. that you have these informal and formal various levels of formality pitches coming in that you're trying to then push off to someone else. I think you need to get very specific about the incoming channel. If you want to send us a pitch for this, here is how it works. You know, there is some guidelines or rules for how you structure these pitches. Maybe it's in a web form and not an email. Maybe it goes into some sort of IT system.

I don't know. But it's really clear to the person writing. Here's the information I'm giving. Here is what I should expect in terms of responses. You have to figure that all out. Structuring the incoming information, setting expectations properly. Now it's much easier if you want to plug in someone to help process that's information. It's a lot easier to do so because they're not implicitly in charge of that.

The information is coming in structure. The expectations of responses are already set. And the guidelines or guardrails you can set for this new assistant can be much more clear. And for them it might be some sort of, I don't know what this is going to be, but maybe some sort of triaging or putting things into a database. You have a weekly meeting in which you go through all of the new high probability options and you can mark them real quickly. Like this one, this one, this one, we want to follow up on. This one we want to put a pin in. You know, you can have some internal systems there for going through it.

But structure, structure, structure is going to be critical here. So it'll be very clear about here's how you send this pitches. Here's the format. Here's the expectations. And on the other side, have a very clear structure for how you then. have that assistant process those pitches and how you interact with that assistant about what to do with them, what the different options are. So clarity and structure is really key if you're going to use someone to manage incoming information. The thing that typically doesn't work is I get

a lot of email about a lot of things, hey, can you just do that for me and let me know what I need to know? Because when it's that informal and that unstructured assistance aren't useful. But if it's very structured what you're working with, then assistance can actually fit into that structured system in a very useful way. One little caveat I'll give you, though, I have seen this happen more than once. That where people really structure their communication channels in preparation of having someone help them handle those channels, they discover that those channels become so much easier to handle that it's actually more trouble than it's worth to have someone else enter that system.

Once everyone's filling out this form and it goes straight into this database and me and my assistant director can just sit down for 20 minutes once a week and very quickly go through this and check most things off, but see three or four that we want to follow up on. And my assistant director follows up on them. We don't really need another person. So just keep that in mind. If your system is appropriate for an assistant, in a lot of cases, that means it's no longer needs an assistant to effectively handle. All right. I think that's enough about work. Let's do a few questions here about the deep life. We have a question here from Caitlin. Caitlin says, how would you recommend structuring large amounts of leisure time for someone who doesn't have children?

As she elaborates, she currently finds herself in the, quote, fortunate position, end quote, of having lots of free time. I was trying to figure out what to do with all this free time beyond just reading. Well, Caitlin, one solution is to have kids. That would definitely take care of the problem of having too much leisure time. It would snap up that problem, clean up that problem right quick. Put you the opposite into the spectrum. But no, okay, you're in the situation where you don't have kids, so unlike the rest of us, you actually have free time.

Good for you. My general recommendation here is guide to structuring of your free time with the deep line. life elements or buckets. So it's difficult. If you have a lot of free time and just say, what do I want to do with it? People tend to force it. I guess I'll do this and join this and, you know, start rowing and read these books. And it's just force.

You're trying to fill the time with a bunch of stuff that you come up with on the fly. It's much better to structure this inquiry by saying, here's the parts of my life that I find important. Community is important. Constitution is important. Contemplation is important. You know, you go through, right, and craft is important, right? And you can say, what I want to do is try to figure out for each of these. Is there something I could or should be doing that help support, amplify, or make this an important part of my life,

or improve my experience with this element of my life? And now you have some more structure to it. So over for contemplation, maybe that's where your reading is going on, for example, and you add to it like a hiking habit. But then over in Constitution, you're like, well, then I'm going to start building out a type of fitness habit over there. And when it comes to community, well, I have a lot of free time. So how can I sacrifice more time and attention on behalf of people I care about? How can I, through volunteer work, be more involved in my community? Maybe there's something I want to do here with craft while I'm working, but my work's not take up a lot of time.

So maybe there's a skill I want to develop that's going to push my career to the next level. You can easily fill your time this way, except for now it's not you trying to come with a random list. your list of activities are actually covering different elements that you think are important. You have a reason for them. You're spreading out the positive impact in a way that doesn't overlap. And you're going to, I think, fill that time up right quick. And then if you have kids, all that time will go away and you'll really miss it. Our next question comes from Gallum.

Gallum says, where is my precious, my precious, my precious? Gallum, I think the hobbits have it. Oh, there's another part of the question here. Hi Cal, with the pandemic-induced rise in remote work, there's naturally been an increased interest in digital nomadism since reading your last several books, along with shop class as Soulcraft. I've become fascinated with this lifestyle and its growing viability, but also doubtful of its ability to foster much deep work, a sense of capital Q quality, or to score highly in self-determination theory. Do you see this as an increasingly, the future of remote work, and in general, what are your thoughts? the ability to satisfy those metrics. All right, so digital nomadism, you know, this was really kicked off in a big way,

culturally, with Tim Ferriss's The Four Hour Work Week. This is a lifestyle where you work remotely, and because of that, you're able to travel throughout the world. Typically, this travel is slow, like you might spend a few months in each location, and you can connect via the internet to actually get your work done. So the question is, remote work is, way more palatable now than it was, let's say, when the four-hour work week came out. That book talks a lot about how do you convince your boss that this very novel notion of remote work is something they should allow you to try.

Of course, today that's not an issue. Remote work is almost assumed as a default, at least temporarily, because of the pandemic. So is that going to give rise to more digital nomadism? Interesting question. I think in many ways there's a tension here. when we think about digital nomadism today versus 15 years ago, let's say when the four-hour work week came out, where some things are easier and some things are harder.

So it's intention. The thing that's easier, as I just mentioned, is that getting permission to work remotely is not hard anymore. And it's a very easy argument to make. A lot of companies are doing it permanently or semi-permanently. If a company is somewhat in person, and it's not a crazy ass to say, I will join your company, but I want to be remote. So that's a lot easier.

The other hand, what's harder is the style of work that is predominant today compared to 15 years ago is a lot less compatible with the main elements of nomadism. In particular, the increasing dominance and hyperactivity of the hyperactive hive mind really makes digital nomadism not so viable. you go back and read a four-hour work week, there was like some meetings you had to deflect and emails were happening, but you could say I'm going to answer these once a day or something like this. In the modern hyperactive hive mind context,

work is basically an ongoing conversation. Back and forth messages with multiple different people and multiple different projects that are being worked out more or less in a semi-asynchronous real time throughout the entire day, punctuated again and again by Zoom meetings. in that context, it's a bit of a waste to be on the beach in Brazil or in the mountains in Tibet because you're not going to be in the waves and you're not going to be hiking in the snow. You're going to be on Zoom meeting number four while answering email number 45.

So we have this tension. And it's almost like a cruel, a cruel trap, an ironic digital era Edgar Allen Poe plot device that just as it becomes easy to do. to disconnect, to disengage your work from a given location, the work itself changes so that you can no longer do that work remotely in a way that's at all interesting. So I don't think there's going to be a giant rise in digital nomadism right now. What I think has to happen is that second phase of the remote revolution that I talked about in the deep dive that opened today's episode, that phase where we move away from the hyperactive high bind to way more outcome-driven, structured approaches, to work, then things are going to get interesting because you're going to have so many more

people in the situation that Tim Ferriss had to give you tons of instructions to try to get into 15 years ago. So many more people for where the location where they work doesn't matter. They're not tethered to constant communication and meetings. It's very outcome driven, very structured. They have a lot of autonomy in how that work actually gets executed. That's going to be an interesting setting. Now, if you want to work somewhere interesting and do interesting things and interleaf interesting

things with your work during the day, it's going to be almost trivial to implement that. So maybe we will see a resurgence in digital nomadism once we fix the actual structure of work. The counterpoint to that, Gollum, the counterpoint is once

we get much more structured and efficient about work, those efficiency advantages that Ferris talked about 15 years ago might go away. So once everyone is out of the hyperactive hive mind and everyone is no longer in Zoom meetings all the day, everyone becomes more effective, the expectations of how much work you get done might go up,

and the amount of time you have to actually spend working might increase. So we'll see. Again, there could be a cruel trap that springs here in the end where we become much more effective. And because of that, the amount of work we are expected to produce increases and we don't find ourselves with any free time. I, however, think it'll be a while until we get there. So, no, I don't think in the next six months, we're going to see a lot of people moving to Bali to do their work. next few years, some sort of rough equivalent of that might become more common.

Our next question here comes from Arjan, who says, what do you think of RSS feeds as an alternative to social media to keep up with topics people care about? I'm a big believer in the RSS model. When I was coming up as someone who was talking to an audience on the internet, RSS feeds is what it was all about. This was in the early Web 2.0 days where you had your own domain. Here is my website. On this website, I have some sort of content management system like WordPress where I'm writing articles. And if people like these articles, they can subscribe to my RSS feed. And it will show up in their RSS reader along with articles from other websites that they like.

And how do they discover new websites that subscribe to? Well, maybe they see the people they already follow link to other websites. They check it out. they like it, they experiment with subscribing to it. If they like it, they keep it in their subscription feed. I think this was an incredibly healthy approach

to distributed information, construction, and consumption. RSS really reduced in its impact as the next phase of Web 2.0 took off, which was the consolidation of distributed content construction under the walled gardens within the walled gardens

of the major social media platform monopolies. Google, for example, killed their very popular Google new RSS reader. Arguably, this was in part because they felt that they couldn't control that world. The content was being created distributedly. They didn't own those sites. They would rather make a play to own platforms. And though their plays to have text-based social media platforms didn't quite turn out, obviously their play to have YouTube as a video-based content production platform did pay out.

That was the model they wanted. It's our servers. We have all the information. We can track everything you do. We do not want you going through Google to independent places where content's coming from and have that content come straight to you. We want that content to live in our world where we can watch it, see who looks at it, get all the information about it, monetize it better. So RSS, I think of as being distributed and democratic. Monopoly platforms are the opposite.

The opposite is what is currently taken over. So I'm nostalgic for them. Maybe there's a way to get back to it. I don't know, but I just think it's worth emphasizing that there are a lot of implicit advantages to a world of independent content creation to which you one-on-one subscribe, peer-to-peer subscription. I like you, I'm going to subscribe to your work. No centralized newsfeed algorithm needed. This data does not have to exist in someone's servers with all the other data in the world. It can be my server, going to your phone, peer-to-peer type subscription.

I think there's a lot of advantages to this. First of all, of course, there's the privacy issues. you don't have someone looking over your shoulder. Again, this is why Google did not like their RSS reader because they didn't know what you were doing. They couldn't watch you. All they knew was like what articles you wanted to read, but they couldn't control anything about your experience,

and they didn't like that. There is also, however, even more implicitly, the value of, we can think of it as distributed content curation that happens in the world of independent content production. In the world of independent content construction, construction, there's a lot of sort of social capital and community capital involved in me deciding to subscribe to someone. The way their website looks, the way people I trust talk about this person,

I've seen it linked to enough times, okay, I'm going to maybe link to you. There's a huge complex context in which content consumption occurs. When you leave the independent content construction model and go to the platform monopolies, all that context collapses. Everyone's content shows up in the exact same YouTube user interface, the exact same Facebook interface. Everything looks the same, the same clean look. It's all interchangeable. It's all showing up in a news feed that's being nudged by algorithms. Now it's very difficult for me to do this type of curation to try to discern what's quality information, what's not, what's suspect, what's not.

It all is just the same. And so if you're worried about things like misinformation or disinformation, you can you can quixotically go down the path of solution of, you know, just let me and the people I know censor everything and try to figure out what's good and what's bad, but it's very hard to get that right. We had a pretty good curation system that emerged implicitly back when we were doing RSS-driven independent content construction. Because now when there's someone who has, you know, some theory about a, you know, COVID vaccine is going to put a, a microchip that communicates with the contrails. You know, back in that day, that's going to be on a wonky-looking website that I'm not going to come across. I'm unlikely to come across it, and it's unlikely the people that I already trust because we

have social capital and social bonds established are going to recommend that site, and I'm just not going to see it. And if I did come across it randomly, I'm going to be this looks like a crazy person's website. Today, in an era of Facebook, it looks exactly the same format-wise as a post from, you know, a reporter you trust and from a news service. It all looks the same. And so it's much harder now to try to understand what am I going to consume, what am I not

consume, what am I going to trust? So I am a big believer that independent content construction with peer-to-peer subscription is a superior way to open the doors to more construction, I mean, more creation, to open the gates to more people being able to express themselves, more diversity of ideas and innovation, while avoiding a lot of the unexpected unintended consequences that we're all paying the price for right now. There is dangers to saying forget this independent stuff. You all just come into my garden.

We'll print all your stuff in the exact same font in our digital newspaper here and just leave it to us to figure out what stuff to feature and what stuff did not feature. That is a hard game to win. The way we were doing it before, this distributed implicit distributed content curation and actually works surprisingly well. All right.

I think we have time for one last question here. This one comes from Erica. She asks, how do I find more like-minded people to build friendships or a sense of community with that share the same philosophies as you and other listeners of your show? That's a good question.

I mean, if you're looking for Cal Newport fans, probably TikTok, it's a good place to look, Twitter moments You know, whenever there's a or a trending topic on Twitter you'll probably find a lot of Cal Newport fans furiously tweeting their opinions.

Unboxing videos on YouTube. Go to the comments. Probably a lot of Cal Newport fans there. I'm joking, of course. Actually, this is the irony of it is that deep question types don't spend a lot of time on the platforms that might be the exact platforms

that would help you find other deep questions type. So I appreciate that irony. I will say, I want to organize something myself. I talked about this earlier in the pandemic that once bigger gatherings were more kosher, that we should get a bunch of deep questions, listeners together, and do a live episode of the show. I mean, we're there now from a public health standpoint. I have been to lots of events. I just am busy.

But I do want to do that. I want to organize something maybe at the Republic restaurant that is underneath my studio. So look, if you're in this area, I want to help organize a, the sort of deep questions meetup advance to let me know. But more broadly, how do you meet deep question type people? I think there is enough of you out there that you can put up the bat signal. Like you can actually mention when you're in a group on an email list and a social media post or something, whatever you use to communicate with people, you might just ask. There are any other sort of deep work or deep questions listeners here?

I mean, I come across people all the time who are like, yeah, you know, I do listen to the show. People I come across unrelated, obviously, to me or the show. I think there's just enough of you out there and consolidated in a certain type of demographic. You know, we're talking 25 to 45-year-old knowledge workers of a certain education level or something. It's pretty narrow demographic that if you're in there from a sampling perspective, you have 30 people in a room. there'll probably be a few who listen to the show. We're coming up now in 4 million downloads, right? So you guys are out there.

So I would actually put up the bat signal. I just bring it up. Hey, anyone else listening to the show? Anyone else read deep work? You know, deep work is healthily past the million copies sold markdowns. It's a lot of people out there. Podcast gets listened to by a lot of people. It's 50,000 of you on my email newsletter list.

So put out the bat signal. Like, is there anyone else out here who listens to this? Then qualify it. Are you a hate listener or someone who actually likes it? So you want to do that filtering and then, you know, hang out. Because I do think we have a unique approach. The type of people I talk to, the type of people who I think listen to the show, we're a lot less tribal than a lot of people in our culture right now. We're more willing to expose ourselves to other ideas.

We are more intentional about how we spend our time and how we want to structure our life. We're open to and get excited by new ideas. We're suspicious of technological trends. I think we're all of these things, which is a really cool and unique combination of results of properties. I always love meeting people who are a part of this type of group. So put out the back signal, Erica. Just start asking crowds, you know.

Hey, do you happen to listen to this show? You'll find some people. And you should. Meanwhile, I do want to do something live. We should get at least some of us together here and to come a park or in D.C. somewhere. I'm just too lazy and busy to organize that. But if there's someone out there who's, you know, the booker for a stage or something, I don't know, someone who's involved in helping to organize events will certainly drop me a line at interesting at calnewport.com because that might be fun to do before it gets too cold for an outdoor event.

And speaking of cold, as my studio continues to cool down here, that's a reminder that I need to get ready for my TV appearance. So let's wrap this up. Thank you, everyone who sent in your questions. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener call mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.