Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 14: Habit Tune-Up: Publishing Strategies, Surviving Side Hustles, Productivity for Support Roles, and Cultivating Balance in the Pursuit of Depth

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Figuring out where to publish different types of writing [1:29]* Balancing two careers [7:08]* On productivity in support roles [13:04]* Keeping all aspects of the deep life in balance [22:22]As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing. Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I run a software business and have lots of other interests, including writing. But I'm always conflicted about pursuing any of these interests seriously, because I feel my main work will suffer. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep questions habit tune-up mini-episode. The format here is straightforward. I'm going to answer a handful of audio questions submitted by listeners that focus on the narrow topic of tuning up their productivity and work habits in a period in which our professional lives are increasingly disrupted. If you want to submit your own audio questions for the habit tune-up mini-episodes, go to speakpipe.com slash Calnewport. Again, that's speakpipe.com slash

Cal Newport. One quick note, the original batch of audio questions that you submitted for these many episodes had roughly a 50-50 split between male and female respondents. More recently, the submitted questions have skewed much more towards the male side. So for all of my female listeners who maybe have a question to ask, we want to hear it. So please submit your audio question. All right, let's get started. Our first question comes from a writer named Stacy. Hi, this is Stacy. I'm an aspiring writer. I have trouble getting down to write because I can't decide what to write where. In other words, I can't decide what should be a blog post, what should be an article for another outlet, or what

should be part of a book. I struggle with that and I was wondering how you decide what to write where, what your process is, and whether they blog posts help you develop articles and books and things like that. Stacey, this is a good question. Like you, I have three major targets for my writing. I have my blog. Then I have the national publications to which I semi-regularly contribute articles, such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Wired.

And then I have my books, which come out even less frequently still. Now, the way I see it is that I just have increasingly strict gating criteria. as I move from each level of restriction to the next level of restriction. So my blog is my default. I mean, that's where I go to sketch ideas, to experiment with ideas, to tell stories, and to solicit a lot of feedback from my audience, because I can get almost immediate feedback in both the comment section of my blog, but also through emails from my reader.

So most things by default are going to go towards my blog. the gaining criteria that allows me to at least consider pitching an idea to a national publication, this has a lot to do with actually the quality of the idea. You know, it's easy when you look at something like the Times, the New Yorker from the outside, just to think, oh, these ideas seem interesting. If I had an interesting idea, maybe I could publish it there. But actually, 99% of the ideas you come up with that you think at first might have a home in a national publication, aren't going to make the cut.

It's actually really hard to get an idea that has that right mix of its original, it's timely for the news, it can be rigorously supported by interesting and accurate reporting, and you as the author are the right person to be writing about this topic. To get all those attributes to come together is much more rare. So when I do have an idea where all those attributes come together, then I'll pitch it and see if I get into a national publication. And that, of course, takes a lot more time and a lot more effort. There's just a higher level of craft required,

both in the shaping of your sentences, but also in the depth and accuracy of your research for doing those type of publications. So for me, I'm happy if every semester, let's say, that maybe I would like to do two or three articles at that publication level. So in about three or four months period, maybe if I get two or three of those articles, I'd be pretty happy,

whereas my blog post, I do one a week. so there'd be a lot more. Now, books are the highest level of restriction for me, because now it's not just enough to have the right idea that you have really good evidence for, that you can report on well, that's really interesting. You know, I have high standards for what's going to come into a book because a book's going to take years of my time.

Now, these standards are going to differ depending on what type of books you write. But for me, I'm usually looking for an idea that I internally think of as a blockbuster. So an idea that when you hear it, you can almost, immediately understand it, and it threatens to completely upend some way that you currently understand some important aspect of your life and upend it in a positive way. I love that effect of I'm going to sort of knock you over with the premise. That's why, for example, the new book I'm working on now that's coming out next spring is titled A World Without Email. It's supposed to be an idea that's just going to knock you over when you hear it, and then you're

going to pull yourself up and say, man, I better actually see what's in this book. Right. So those ideas are much more rare. And then also it has to be an idea. that falls right within my sweet spot, which is roughly speaking, the intersection of technology and culture, the various ways that tech can accidentally hold us back in our professional personal lives and the various ways we can intentionally deploy tech to actually get great advantages. So that's really rare, and it can take me one to two years, sometimes to develop an idea. There's a world without email idea I was actually working on a year before deep work was even published. So sometimes these things can take a long amount of time. So again,

gating there's much more restrictive. So that's the way I see it, Stacey, have a default place where you can always quickly and efficiently drop an idea, get some feedback, test out a concept, test out a direction. Then when it comes to publications, have a higher gating criteria when it comes to books, have higher gating criteria as well. The only addendum I would add is be narrow in your focus. Like at each level, don't have too many options.

Don't have, well, I have my blog, but there's 10 other websites I sometimes write for. I think that's too confusing. I think that's going to diffuse your energy and diffuse the value of the feedback. Try to simplify these things. Like here's my home I can control. Here's publications that they have to be good, right? They need to be at a higher level, have more impact than the place you can control. Otherwise, what's the point?

And I only have two or three of those I publish for. And then books is something that you only do even rarer still. All right. So good question, Stacey. I hope that's helpful. Let's move on now to a question, which is within the same vein. That is, it does involve writing, and it's going to ask, how does one do a career like that, while having another job at the same time?

Hi, Cal, my name is Rishi. I have a personal question for you, but the answer would help me in my work life. You seem to have two careers, one as a computer scientist, and one as an author and thinker on the deep life. do you actually see both as careers and do you ever struggle with prioritizing one over the other? I run a software business and have lots of other interests, including writing, but I'm always conflicted about pursuing any of these interests seriously

because I feel my main work will suffer. Rishi, I mean, I would say I don't completely think about what I do right now as two separate careers. I mean, the way I talk about the conciliance between my academic career and my writing career is that I'm a computer scientist. So someone who studies the theory behind new technologies who also writes public-facing books and articles about the intersection of technology and our culture. So not unlike, let's say, you know, Richard Dawkins is a biologist who also spends time writing public-facing books about biologists. So I put myself in that mold. I think that that's more or less accurate. And I think my employer, Georgetown, is happy with that.

I say, yeah, we have a computer scientist who also writes about tech for broader audiences. But that caveat aside, I will say, Rishi, that it's really hard. And what I do is really hard. I work really hard. And I'm really organized. And I have to be really organized to make this work. but I do not have what I would call a relaxed professional life. I mean, it is.

I'm writing books. I'm writing magazine articles. I'm doing blog posting and podcasting. I have to fit this in the time outside of my normal time in which I'm doing my sort of normal academic duties. I mean, this last, let's say six months. I mean, think about this.

I'm a professor. I'm running the graduate program in our department, which is not the easiest thing to do during COVID. because that creates a lot of issues that a lot of fires to put out, you know, especially when your program manager leaves at the beginning of it. So now you have more work than normal and the extra COVID work. During this time, I'm polishing the manuscript for my new book that's coming out in March. I wrote a big long, long form New Yorker piece and a wired piece during this period.

Started up this podcast. Still have the blogging going on. I have a planner I'm launching in November. we're working on an online course with Scott Young more about that soon. In other words, I had to get after it and it was hard. And there's just, I don't know, I have to work hard. I have to fill every hours. And sometimes it is exhausting.

So I don't want to sugarcoat it. It is really hard. So Rishi, take it seriously if you're thinking about casually adding a second career, it's not something that I'm going to tell you is not going to be a problem. Go for it. That being said, you mentioned writing in particular. And I'll say, here's the nice thing about writing. as a potential second career, it doesn't actually become really hard until you succeed.

And I think that's a really good property of this particular second career. So when you're first starting as writing as a second career, all you really have to do is have some regular time that you put aside for writing every day. And it could be in the morning or it could be at night and it could be outside your normal work hours and you have a nice location you go to to do this writing. This is well-trod territory. And it's not so hard. I mean, I've talked about it on this podcast before.

I love collecting stories of famous fiction writers. I love collecting stories of how they got started at writing, all of whom got started on the side. So I've talked before about, you know, Jean Grisham writing a time to kill and followed by the firm on legal pads at 5 a.m. before going to his law practice. And actually, at the time, he also had a seat in the state legislature in Mississippi. So he had quite a bit on his plate.

He'd write in the morning. I've written about the recently deceased Clive Custler. or one of my favorite adventure writers. He would write at night after his kids went to bed because his wife worked a night shift and he was bored. Michael Crichton famously would write wherever he could while a medical resident, including on the shuttle buses back and forth to the hospital

and in the break rooms where the residents try to get some sleep. And so this is well-trod path. You can just find some time you can write. If it goes well, okay, then things get more difficult. right so when now you have to produce the book on deadline when now you have to do the interviews when now you know like i've faced you have to get back and forth across the country to do media appearances without missing classes you know that's where spring breaks go for me where are you well okay i have a week off from classes great let me go out to california and do a

west coast swing you know my publicity tour when you have to deal with things like your normal relationship with the faculty in your department when you also have like CBS's camera team there because CBS this morning is doing an interview on campus and wants to show you walking through your hallways and this is disruptive to everyone else. I mean, once you succeed, then it becomes your demands get a lot higher and juggling it becomes more difficult. But I love that property that you don't have to make that sacrifice until there's something worth making that sacrifice for. So I don't mean Rishi to turn this into a venting session about the difficulties. of running two careers at the same time.

I will just summarize it this way. If you want to write while also having a career as a software developer, the first thing to do is to write. Two hours a day, you can find that time. It won't be that disruptive. No one will really care. If you succeed, things will get more difficult. But, hey, that is a good reason for difficulty.

And you can cross that bridge when you get there. So thanks for that question. All right, let's move on to one more here. Hi, my name's Hannah. And I live in the UK. and I work full time as a personal assistant. I know some of the tips you advise is to tell people to turn off their inbox, turn off distractions, etc. By being a personal assistant, I don't have a luxury to do that.

My job is to really like monitor emails and just deal with chaos. Have you got any tips to help me with being more productive, please? Thank you. I have a few pieces of advice for someone like you who is in a support position. So the first thing I would offer is that if you can tackle things sequentially, you will end up getting a lot more done and you'll feel a lot less burnt out. So what I mean by sequentially is take the current thing you're working on and work on it until you get to a natural breaking point with no distractions.

So in other words, let's say, okay, I have a message here that's saying, can you book me whatever, a flight. I'm going to work on getting what I need, the information I need, and booking that flight and getting you the information until I'm done doing that. And while I'm working on this one task, I'm not going to check other emails and I'm not going to look at Slack. Right. So you go sequential. Okay, now what's the next thing?

Oh, maybe this next thing is too big for me to do it once, but I'm going to work on it until a natural breaking point. Until I get to that natural breaking point, no email, no slack. Now, these sessions might be small. It might take you 15 minutes. to book the ticket. But still, you do that 50 minutes with no distractions. Then you say, what's next? Okay, the best next thing for me to do is to work on this big project. Let me make a half hour of progress researching this. Write down what I found without looking at any other things. Now I'm done. Let me look up and say what's next. So in support roles, when you tackle things

one by one without trying to change your context within each task, it's much less overwhelming to your sort of cognitive environment. And you get things. done faster. That's my first piece of advice. This notion of distractions being bad applies as well to logistical tasks as it does to the type of rarefied, cognitively demanding high-skilled tasks like computer programming that I talk about more frequently in books like deep work. My second piece of advice is you need to get the information that's coming at you, the request, the obligation, the task. You need to get them out of your inbox and out of Slack and into a better system where you can A, organize them, B, easily keep track of their status, and C, append them

with relevant information. inbox is a terrible information management system. Slack is a terrible information management system. You need to move what's on your plate into a more organized plate. We tend to underestimate, especially in support roles, the amount of cognitive overhead that's required when we're not using these systems, because somewhere we have to keep track of what's urgent, what's not, what do I need to get back to, what do I already know about this? That information has to exist somewhere. If you just have a messy inbox, that information is existing in your brain.

And it's taking up room, it's causing stress, it's causing interference with other types of cognitive activities, and in general, making you less happy and worse at your job. So to succeed in a support role, you have to have some sort of internal system to take this stuff out of the generic communication channels and into the much more structured world. one place within the larger umbrella of support where they do this really well is IT support. There they use ticketing systems. The whole point of ticketing systems is when a request comes in, you know, when I send a request that I can't get Microsoft Word to work or something like this, it gets turned into a ticket

in a ticketing system where it is categorized by keywords, its status is really clear, IT support professionals working at the university, look at all the incoming tickets, choose one that they're well suited to work on. They work on it. They update the ticket in the system with notes. They update it status. And then when they're done, they can move on to the next thing. The system will even send automatic updates to me via email to let me know that, hey, someone's working on it.

Here's the status. All the overhead of keeping track of what is this thing? What do we know about it? What's the status? Who is working on it? Have we told the originator of this request where we are? All that is taken out of the personal cognitive space of the IT support professionals and put into the system itself, it relieves a lot of cognitive resources. Ticketing systems were a revolution

in IT productivity. The amount of cases that can be successfully handed per IT professional greatly increased when we added these digital support. Right. So that's just an example of there is a lot of gains to be had in terms of how much you can get done, how well you can get it done, and how you feel if you're very organized about what's on my plate, what's its status, what do I know about it? So you could, for example, you could use a ticketing system. I have used ticketing systems, let's say in my role as director of graduate studies at Georgetown where it's just me and my program manager, the only people who have access to it. The students and faculty we serve don't even know we're using a ticketing system, but for us

to actually have, you know, tickets for each of these emails where we can write back and forth to each other what's the status where I can assign something to him and then he can work on it and he can assign it back to me and we don't have to just send emails back and forth to coordinate this work made us much more effective. But if you don't want to use an actual ticketing system, something as simple as a Trello board. I talk about this a lot, but you can just have columns on your Trello board for different types of work or different work statuses. You can have cards for each of these tasks. You can move them between the different columns to represent their changing status. And then, of course, you can flip the virtual card over and attach files and write information

or add checklist. So everything you need to know about an obligation is there in one point. So that's crucial, Hanna. Get things out of your inbox into a much better system. The final thing I would say is to the extent possible, you want to introduce efficient workflows for regularly occurring tasks. So if there's something that you deal with a lot in your support role, that at the moment requires, let's say, multiple back and forth email messages that unfold throughout a day

and therefore become an extra source of attention fragmentation, that hurts your efforts to be more sequential, taking things on one by one. Maybe there is a more structured workflow here, more structured process, that allows you to get that task done without so many emails or in a way that requires much less cognitive overhead or planning. You know, let's say you're doing, one of the things you commonly is scheduling meetings for someone that you support. There is a lot of tools that can greatly simplify this process of scheduling meetings

that means you don't have to send back and forth three messages like, okay, when is good, how about this time? Ooh, Bob can't do it at one with two o'clock work. You know, instead, the person you support can just maintain an acuity calendar where they maintain their availability and then you're able to just book things directly into there and they get all the relevant details and they don't have to have any sort of extended back and forth with you. That's just an example. But basically, keep thinking, is there some regular rules or processes or systems we can put

in place that would take this regular occurring task and reduce the overhead? Now, some of these processes might just be internal to you. the people you support have no idea that you're using them. It just helps you batch and organize and get through regularly occurring types of work more easily. And some of these processes, you can work with the people you support. And they would be involved in them as well. And it makes things easier. Usually the trick there is to present these as processes that's going to make their life easier.

If you come at it from this is going to make my life easier, but your life more complicated, the sort of unfortunate power dynamic reality of support roles is that they will probably say, I don't like that. No, I don't like that one bit. But if it's like, who, I found a way so you can save some time, then they might be on board. All right. So it's a good question. And I don't know if I talk enough about this in my existing writing about the different types of roles in the knowledge work setting have different types of strategies that get you to the same place of taking advantage of the reality of the human brain.

I call this sometimes neuroproductivity, this idea that when we think about how to run an office, we should do so with the reality of how the human brain operates in mind. And I do talk a lot about that for makers, people who, you know, program or write books. And, you know, what we want to do there is keep them with undistracted concentration. But again, if you're a manager, for example, the way you do your work well that respects the reality of your brain is going to be different than it is for a maker. And if you're in a support role, then how you're going to structure your work to better take advantage of the reality of the human brain so you can be effective. It's going to look different

than it does for manager. So I'm glad you asked this question. I will say, Hannah, my new book, which is not coming out until March, but in that new book, I get really into that distinction between makers, managers, and what I literally call minders, but basically support stuff. I get really into that distinction. And so I'm glad I had a chance now to preview some of those ideas. Okay, so I think we have time to slip in one last question. Hi, Carl. Thanks for your awesome podcast. I haven't missed a single episode since you started it. And I find myself anxiously waiting for the next episode, which I inevitably end up finding super helpful. So my name is Marco and I am a software engineer based in Belfast in the UK. And my question is about living a life where all the important areas are well taken care of. I've heard you touching on this. And yes, broadly speaking, I would like work, but also family, faith, finances, health, etc., to be well look after.

Now, I find that if I'm having a particularly busy time at work, the other areas tend to fall behind. And similarly, if we are under pressure financially, it's hard to be focused at work. You get the point. So what's a good system or approach that I can use to systematically, daily or weekly or whatever the case, make sure that every area of my life is healthy and well taken care of. Marco, first of all, I appreciate the kind words about the podcast. And I appreciate your question. Now, I think technically speaking, this question falls a little bit outside the normal boundaries of what

we tackle in the habit tune up mini episode where I tend to try to focus on more concrete habits about your work, how to be productive and how to be effective, even when times are disrupted. But I think I want to tackle this question here anyways because it is important. If you feel like your focus on your career is going to diminish other aspects of your life that are very important, then it's going to be hard for you to sustain focus on your career. It's going to be hard for you to care about tuning up your habits if you worry that the impact itself is going to be broadly negative. So I think we should tackle this broader issue.

Now, the way you talk about things is pretty congruent with the way I talk about what I call the deep life. In my normal deep question, full-length podcast, and on my blog, we talk about this topic often. And like you, I tend to break down life into different areas. And you have multiple areas that are important. And the deep life requires that in each of those different areas, you focus on, what are the big swings? What are the commitments that are going to give me really big returns and then be very wary about the distractions in each of those areas that could keep you away from the things that matter? So you have your work life, but you also have your family life and community. You have your health.

You have your philosophical or theological life, etc. So how do you keep all of these healthy? Well, I would say there are seasons for sure. There are seasons of life where certain buckets are going to get more focused than us. others. I think that's okay. Certainly for me, for example, during this past spring, when the COVID lockdowns came in and there was a lot of economic uncertainty, when the university where I work was like, hey, we're going to start cutting your benefits and we can't guarantee that we're not going to start cutting your salary and we're probably going

to have to let people go as well. When the publishing industry, the other place where I make money early on in this lockdown was saying, we don't know how this is going to shake out. You know, we don't know what's going to happen here. And if we're going to be able to keep buying books at the rate or prices that we've been buying books, if people are going to still purchase our titles at the rate or quantities at which they've been purchasing titles, when all that uncertainty was happening, my focus definitely turned towards craft. I entered hustle mode. And I've been in hustle mode since then, you know, I definitely took on the hunters got to hunt mentality of, okay, we're going to diversify, we're going to grow, we're not going to be beholden to any one institution or source of

income for our family survival. We need options. We need flexibility. And so that sort of what I call craft a bucket in the various deep life bucket I care about got a lot of emphasis. That would be very different than let's say a couple years ago. You know, I was newly tenured. I didn't have a new book imminently coming out and I had just had my third child. I think I was even on leave at that time. I mean, look, that would have been a very different time, obviously. That's a season of my life in which to focus on family was going to be obviously receiving the most energy, right? So there's different seasons. And I think that's fine.

But you're right to point out that you don't want to allow this sort of seasonal focus to take other aspects of your life you care about and move the attention there down to zero or to lead you to backtrack. You don't want a season where you're focused a lot on, let's say, your health to be a season in which you take steps backwards on your finances or a season where you have to really get after it with your career. You don't want your faith or theological life to diminish and no longer be a source of resilience and comfort for hard things that come ahead. So how do we balance these two competing goals? Well, the advice I've been giving recently is that what you want to

have in each of these buckets is some sort of keystone activity that you do, daily preferably. I mean, it could be weekly, but I think daily is easier, and that you track. And you track it in a notebook. And at the end of each day, it takes you 90 seconds. As the last thing you do it each day is you write down in the notebook little metrics. Did I do this? Did I do this? Did I do this? And these should be keystone activities that basically keep you at a baseline of intention in each of the areas that's important to you. They should be. things that basically you train yourself to just do and you feel really bad if you miss them. So you just do them. And it's important that you track them because knowing that you're going to

write down in that notebook in black and white, whether or not you did that activity is in itself a great inducer to activity. Now, these don't have to be particularly time consuming. They don't have to be enough on their own to prop up this each bucket of your life to a really high level, but it's enough to make sure that you're giving intention and respect to all the areas of your life at least at a baseline and that you're signaling to yourself that in each of these areas of my life, it's something I take seriously. I'm willing to sacrifice for. I'm willing to make commitments towards. So then against this baseline, you can then focus in different seasons of your life on different aspects of your life with more intensity. So you're doing the baseline at work. You're doing

the baseline with family. You're doing the baseline with health. And then maybe during a certain summer, you add a lot of extra attention to health, right? I'm in really good shape this summer. or during another period, I'm going to put a lot of extra attention to growing my business. But the baselines stay there. Steady drumbeat. So I have things like this.

I mean, I don't want to go in too much specific detail, but like in health, there's just certain foundational things I do every day. I ride them in my notebook. In my career life, like right now, I have this very foundational, I call it a three plus two role. Three hours of deep work every day,

read two chapters of something outside. of that work. And right now I have the extra caveat that at least one of those three hours has to be on computer science research. I'm coming out of a period where basically the world blew up at Georgetown in the spring because I'm trying to run this graduate program. And there's a lot of complexities when you have a lot of international students and all the countries are closing up their borders and the administration's changing visa rules.

And it was chaos. And it slowed down my research for a half year during the period of the year where I normally do most of my research. I don't like that at all. So my baseline three plus two, but at least one of those three hours has to be computer science because I want that drumbeat every single day. I have to force it, however I have to fit it, every single day I'm working on research. Right, that's a drumbeat, something I'm keeping going in the background. So that's my recommendation.

The only caveat I'd give Marko is it's hard to find to write keystone activities. Right means that it's effective, like it does signal to yourself that you take something seriously and has real effects, but is tracking. and you'll actually do it every day. And it's easy to come up with these things that are way too ambitious, but that's not going to help you. And it's easy to say, you know, I'm going to exercise three hours a day. Yeah, that would really signal you take your health seriously, but guess what?

You're not going to find three hours a day to do that. And if it's not tractable, then it's going to go away. So you've got to find that balance. It's an important activity. With some care, I can do it every day. It will have a positive effect and will signal to myself, I take this part of my life seriously, but it's not too over the top or too ambitious.

So experiment. It might take you a couple months before you have the right activity in each of your buckets. But I can tell you it makes a really big difference. And again, you have to track it. You have to write it down. I use a large format lined moleskin notebook. Actually, I'm using now there's a yearly calendar mulskin, which I really like. It basically has a two-page spread for each week.

So on the left side, you have months. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday, Friday, and then the weekends take up one row, and then the right side is a space for notes. So it's not a ton of space for each day, but it's a perfect amount of space for me to fit my metrics. You've got to track it. You want to see that record in black and white. I did it today. I did it yesterday. I did it the day before, et cetera. And just get into that habit. I think this is so important that in the planner, again, something else I haven't talked a lot about, but, you know, speaking of, you know, hustling and hunters got to hunt, in November, I have a planner being released, a time block planner. And I'll talk more about this as we get closer,

but it's a planner that makes it very easy to execute the time blocking strategy that I'm always preaching. I insisted on that planner having a space for every day for tracking exactly these type of metrics. Because that's how important I think it is, how foundational is to living a deep life. Okay, so this question was a little bit far afield, but I'm glad I got a chance to answer it here, Marco. I think it's very important. I think everyone needs to identify. Here are the buckets that are important to me in my life. In each of these buckets, I have a keystone activity that I do every day and I write it down in black and white at the end of each day. If you can get those keystone activities right, you're going to feel a great resilience through hard times,

and you were going to resist that sinking sensation of while my attention was over here, this other part of my life diminished. And then when I ran over there to fix that, that part, where I was focused before, it begins to diminish and so on. Founding. baseline intentional activity I think is absolutely crucial to keeping life consistently deep during inconsistently difficult times. So that's all the time we have for today.

Thank you to Stacey, Rishi, Hana, and Marco for these great questions. If you want to submit questions of your own, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. Until the next time, as always, stay deep.