Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 145: Is the Deep Life Compatible with Serving Humanity?

Episode Date: November 8, 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: My October reading list [1:49]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS: - How do you avoid burn out from deep work? [11:55] - Are your (Cal's) systems for tracking deep work and for tracking GTD projects independent? [13:59] - Does studying “on the go” incur cognitive burden? [18:07] - What category of things do you track on your (Cal's) Trello boards? [26:42] - What skills are most important for an undergraduate looking to become a professor? [32:12]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS: - What would you recommend to a doctoral student without a mentor?  [36:53] - How do you balance physical and digital tools in productivity?  [39:16] - Do you suggest reading for quality or quantity with non-fiction books?  [41:34] - How do you apply your ideas to make sure your family can pursue a deeper life?  [43:25] - Is the deep life compatible with helping humanity?  [48:27]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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This is not the first podcast episode to be released in November, but it is actually the first podcast episode that I'm recording in the month of November. So based on some feedback from listeners, I thought it might be interesting to go through my October reading list, the books I read in October. Quick reminder, you know I'm a big advocate of the reading life. I think you should be reading more books than seems reasonable. There's a lot of benefits to being a frequent reader. My goal, as I talk about on the show, is to read five books a month. I try to build my schedule around making that possible. And so let's report on the five books that I read in October.

I'll give you the technicality, by the way. I measure books when I finish them. So typically, technically the first two books I finished in October and there was two books I started in October that I just finished in early November. So these are the five books. Let's say I finished in October. All right. The first was that film study textbook I've been talking about for some reason. As I've mentioned, I just decided I needed to read a 600-page textbook about an intro to film studies.

So now I know more about the Italian neorealist than I probably need to, but that was useful. But I won't go into too much detail on that. That was just why not. I read a book called The Big Picture. So this followed my theme of Hollywood-themed books. The Big Picture was actually about the change in the film industry that happened in the first decade of the 2000s where mid-budget, sort of $80 million star vehicle. So basically all of the Will Smith movies or all the Adam Sandler movies that Sony was producing in the 90s. those no longer became as profitable.

The whole film industry shifted towards franchise movies, movies built around notable IP. This was actually a really good book that got into why that shift happened and who the main characters are. Based largely the narrative spying here is Sony because WikiLeaks released all of these emails from Sony years ago. So the reporter had great insider access about what was actually happening, what Amy Pascal was actually saying to people, what the pressure is actually worth. That was an interesting book if you're interested in Hollywood. Then I read The Adronoma Strain. Michael Crichton's first book written under his own name. He did write thrillers and detective novels under pseudonyms while a med student.

This is where he actually honed his skills. But the Adronomestrain was his first book written under his own name. I bought new editions of the Adronomestrain, Jurassic Park, and The Lost World. I bought them for my oldest son because, you know, he's reading those now. This was the age when I started reading them. But I said, hey, I have these here. And I hadn't read Adronomus Train in a while. And it held up.

Interesting thing about Adronomestrain. So a listener sent me an article, an interview with the editor, Crichton's longtime editor, who edited the Adronomus Train. And there's an interesting backstory to it. I mean, essentially what happened is Crichton had written a draft of this book that was in a a standard novel form. So there was lots of backstories of the scientist involved. There was a lot of looking inside their inner emotions and how they were feeling.

It was a long book. It was a classical novel that also happened to involve a killer mutant space bug that was going to destroy the whole world, that they had to somehow figure out in a top secret underground lab that for some reason has a thermonuclear device wired into it to go off automatically and laser-guided dark guns to try to anesthetize escaping monkeys. So I had all that, but it was also written by a traditional novel. According to this interview, Crichton's editor said, you know, Michael, this is not going to work like this. I want you to try something different, something that the time was quite new. He said, I think you should write this like a New Yorker article. Imagine this was a New Yorker article about a thing that actually happened, right?

So it would be the action. This happened and this happened and this happened. You're documenting something that happened with minimal insight. into the thoughts and feelings of the characters, maybe a little bit, right? If you read a magazine profile, like in The New Yorker, there's a little bit of guessing at how people felt, but there wouldn't be long backstories.

You wouldn't know in great detail what their feelings. Just write it like you were documenting something that happened. And that's what made the whole book work. So if you go back and read it, it's a fantastically paced book. It jumps right into the ash, like this happened and this happened and this happened, and these people do here. You find out a little bit about people's backstories. to the extent again you would in a magazine article but not big long exposition, not big long flashbacks.

And the book just rock and rolls. Anna had his trademark, which he was just inventing at this point, superfluous technical details. There's computer printouts and electron scanning microscopes. And the whole thing just came together. He invented a whole genre with it. The book is propulsively forward moving. The other thing I wanted to say about the adronomist drain is it reads incredibly modern. It is surprising how old it is.

This book is so old that we hadn't gone to the moon yet. It's kind of interesting. You think about Crichton. You're like, yeah, Jurassic Park, ER. You think about the 90s, right? You think of him as much more contemporaneous, and he was obviously very big at that point. But he wrote this book in the mid-1960s. Again, he was 20-something young.

He was in med school at the time. And so there's the anachronisms that catch your attention. is he really knew very little about space and what was up in space. Like we had sent some probes up there, but we hadn't yet even gotten, you know, we get John Glennon gone to space,

but we hadn't even gone to the moon yet. And so it was, it had this vision of what the future of space was going to be like. So that's old. That's how old the adronomasterine is. We hadn't even done the Apollo program yet. Anyways, I recommend that it was great.

Moving down the list, I read a book called Moralizing Technology. Now, this is more of an academic book. It was written by Peter Paul Verbeek, a Dutch technology ethicist. This is a book, I think, is going to be, I can already tell, influential in my thinking about digital ethics.

I've begun to deep dive into digital ethics from an academic perspective in more detail than I have before. The theory that Peter Paul Verbeek lays out, it's now known as mediation theory, seems about right. I mean, I think he's really on to something. He actually pulls from late,

stage Foucault. A late stage Foucault is not as well known. A lot of the A lot of the way that Foucault is referenced and modified and used today is sort of more of the earlier stage Foucault. But there's this late stage Foucault where he was trying to figure out how do you actually build a morality and moral lives

in a world where things are all dictated by power and power dynamics. Anyways, I won't go into the detail other than to say, I think Verbeek is on to something with mediation theory. digital minimalism I am now convinced is accidentally, I mean I wasn't doing this on purpose, is accidentally I would say a case study of Verbeek's mediation theory made practical. Digital minimalism really is an example of it. At a very high level with mediation theory, when you're trying to understand morality and technology, there's this dance that happens where the technology itself, its existence in the world,

its existence in your life has a non-trivial impact on your landscape of moral possibilities. So it has some control there. But then you have control in terms of how you interact with these devices. Once you understand this impact on your life and your world, you can then try to reshape your life. In awareness of this, there's this back and forth dance between what you can control and the technology's impacts. It stays between the theory of on one side full determinism. You're out of luck. The tech just determines how society unfold.

And on the other hand, full instrumentalism, it's all up to the people. Tech is neutral. It's a really sophisticated theory. I think he's right. Digital minimalism is a case study of mediation theory and practice. I might even write an academic paper on that, by the way. Digital minimalism is a case study in the sort of post-phenomological digital ethics. So we'll see.

All right. Fifth book. Why We Get Sick. Just randomly. I'm not quite sure I came across this, I think, on Brett McKay's show. the art of manliness. A show I've been on many times. He was interviewing this author.

That's probably where I heard it. Anyways, I don't know. Nonfiction, I like to throw in some pragmatic nonfiction each month. This was about insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is probably a bigger health issue than we recognize. The interesting thing about all these books about health and dies, they all end up in the same place, which is don't eat sugar, don't eat a bunch of processed food. Stay away from sugar. from highly processed food, stay away from industrial

seed oils. You can get there from a lot of different theories. This book got to the same place. I buy it. I've heard it from enough different places. I think he's on to something. But that was good. It was a quick read and now I know a lot about insulin, the insulin system. All right. So there we go, guys. That is, those are the books. That is my reading list for October. You can see

it's varied. We go from textbook to academic books to expository nonfiction to techno-thriller fiction to pragmatic nonfiction. Variety is key, short, long, hard, easy. I'm two books in already to my November reading list challenge. So I'll be back at the next month. I'll let you know how this month goes. All right, enough of that. Let's move on the questions and start, as always, with queries about deep work. All right. Our first question comes from Shankar, who asks, how do I avoid burnout due to deep work?

He elaborates, it is clear to me that time blocking and deep work are useful for my career advancement, but I have found that constantly forced myself to do hard things leads to burnout. Instead, following my gut and working from list, as David Allen suggests, seems to be healthier. How would you advise one should avoid burnout while working with time blocking and deep work? Well, Schengar, if you're burning out, I would say do less work. as opposed to making the work you do less effective. This is one of the key ideas in my still developing philosophy of slow productivity, which is focusing on less things but doing those things better is almost always the right formula,

almost always to write formula for producing the best quality work, but also the right formula for keeping your working life as sustainable as possible. So it is really intense. When you're time blocking, it's intense. people are going to wonder, why did you not respond to my text messages? How do you not know about what's going on in the world? Because you're locked in doing one thing after another. You know what you're supposed to be doing and that's what you do, whether you feel like it or not.

When you're doing deep work, no distraction, no context shift, full concentration on the thing I'm doing. You're going to produce much better work, but it is draining. There's only so much of this you can do. So do less. Put breaks into your time block schedule. End your day earlier. Pull back on the number of projects that you're getting. giving intense deep work too, I think that's going to be the right formula, right?

As opposed to saying, let me just stop tracking so carefully what I'm doing. As opposed to saying, let me just sort of think, what do I want to do next and move from inboxes, back over to random to do list. That's going to give you a pleasing sense of generic busyness. Urgent stuff will probably get taken care of. Big stuff will happen slower and not as well. I say, do the work right and then figure out what the right amount of work is. that's going to be the better formula.

Our next question comes from Troy. Troy says tracking deep work projects versus GTD projects are your systems for tracking deep work such as quarterly weekly planning and for tracking GTD style projects, i.e. Trello, exclusive. All right. So it's a confusing question. Troy has a long elaboration, which I won't read on air. but if you do read it, it clarifies what he's really asking about here.

So what he's asking about is the connection between, let's say, weekly planning and quarterly planning and task capture and task organization, that are these completely independent or are they somehow mixed together, at least in the productivity system I espouse? It's a good question. I see them as relatively independent. So you should have some sort of system where all. of your obligations are written down, a place where you can clarify them, a place where you can add extra information about them. I'm a big believer of that concept from David Allen that you should not be keeping track of things just in your head. I also think, by the way, here is an amendment to that. You should also be not keeping track of things just in an inbox, get things

as soon as you can out of your inbox into actual tasks. Because when you're looking at tasks on a task board or a task list, you can make sense of them, you can organize them, you can see them all at once you can attach information to them. It is a much less mentally taxing way of encountering your professional obligation landscape than looking through an inbox and just noticing old messages and trying to remember what they imply. However, how you do this, how you organize these tasks, how you capture them, how you get them out of your head, I'm a little bit agnostic.

I like task boards. That's not a David Allen idea. His idea was list separated by context. So you put work in context. I like task boards where I have boards per role and columns per different statuses. I also like that modern task board software allows you to attach a lot of information to these virtual task cards. But there's other people I know who use bullet journals and they keep track of all their task in a bullet journal. There was a time when I was a grad student early on at MIT where I had paper notebooks.

So I kept track of all my tasks on legal pads and it would cross them off. And so I don't really care. You just need some way to get that out of your head. Then we shift over to the other part of my productivity system, which is the multi-scale planning where you have a quarterly plan that lays out your vision for the quarter. This quarterly plan usually contains a more stable vision. So here's my vision. That's pretty stable. Here's how I'm going to make progress on that vision this quarter.

Each week you used a quarterly plan to make a weekly plan. Each day you look at your weekly plan and your calendar to build a reasonable daily plan, preferably using time. This is, as Troy points out, kind of a separate thing. In theory, you could be terrible about task and task systems. You could have a vendetta against David Allen. You could say, I want to keep track of everything in my head. My inbox is my friend. If someone needs something for me, they'll bother me enough times on Slack that'll answer them.

And you could still run the other part of my system. You could still run the multi-scale planning and get the benefits of it. So they are pretty independent. I like to combine them because I don't want the stress of keeping track of task my head. I don't want to forget things. I don't want to waste time. So in my implementation, when I'm working on weekly plans and daily plans, I'm looking at those systems to see what's on my plate. But yeah, in theory, these are independent entities that exist without each other.

You could, on the other hand, just have a good David Allen task system but no multi-scale planning. And that's reasonable as well. You're not going to be making good progress on long-term goals. You're going to be much more haphazard in your work. You're going to be much more reactive. but it's logically feasible. So these are two separate things. They both have benefits.

But when you do them both, I think you get a really good productivity conciliance and what you're able to accomplish becomes a lot better. We have a question now from Dami, who asks, doesn't doing problems on the go as you recommend in how to become a straight-a-student incur a cognitive burden.

This listener goes on to say, I'm entering my junior year in college in Ireland, and I was wondering if the advice that you give to take your problem sheets with you on the go just makes you a quote, grind on wheels, end quote, thanks. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to go back and talk briefly about how to become a straight-a student.

My second book I ever wrote, came out in 2006. I wrote it primarily as an undergraduate slash first year grad student. Interesting aside about that book. It's the best selling of my student books. I stopped really paying attention to that. But for whatever reason, when my agent sent me my royalty statements earlier this week, I was like, hey, how is that book doing?

It turns out how to become a straight-day student has sold now more than 200,000 copies since it came out in 2006. Never with a big marketing push, never on a bestseller list. It just sits there and we just sell. Well, every week. People buy it. It's been there forever. I'm surprised that someone hasn't come and usurped it because the concept was very simple.

I said, what if you just wrote a book about how to study in college that took the question seriously and did nothing but just give advice? Say, okay, I talk to 50 students who get good grades without burning out. Here's how they do it. And just be very technical. That was the whole concept. Treat students with respect. Give them the information. And that book, man, that just rolls along.

and crushed it. How to Went at College? I checked that. That's now crossed healthily past the 100,000 copies sold and how to become a high school superstars catching up. I think it's at 60,000. So there's this secret underground world of those student books I wrote as a young man that are continuing to do some

damage out there. All right, so let me just really briefly tackle your question. I talk about I guess in that book, and Dami, I am mixing up that book with blog post I wrote immediately after that book came out. To me, these are kind of the same thing. The original point of my study hacks blog when I started it right after a straight-a-student

came out was basically to add extra chapters that did not show up in the book. So it was just continuing the conversation that was that book. So I mixed these things up. But I don't know if it was in the book or on my blog back then. I would talk about bringing with you these, you call them problem sheets. These were probably the mega problem sets I talked about in the book, but basically sample problems, which. is at the core of how I suggest in that book

studying for technical classes or mathematical classes. I talk about these are portable. You can bring them with you to study. You're asking, will that make you a grind on wheels? Well, no, because my recommendation is not, okay, when you build these study guides, study with them

all the time. That's not what I'm saying. I wasn't saying, now you want to do 30 hours of studying, and because you have these sheets, you can study much more than you could before. That's not what I'm saying. In fact, the core idea and how to become a straight-day student was the equation. Studying accomplished equals time spent times intensity of focus.

And the whole idea in that book is if you get your intensity of focus higher, you can reduce the time spent required to get the same amount of work done. So the real advantage of having portable study materials is that you can go to locations that are going to juice up that intensity of focus. you can go to the deepest darkest, most concentration-inducing stacks of a far-away library. Shout out to Dana Biomedical Library on the Dartmouth College campus where I used to do this study.

It means you can go into the woods and hike for 20 minutes and sit without distraction by a waterfall to think nothing but about your problems. It means, like one student I wrote about on my blog back then, you can find a way to sneak onto the roof of the fifth, physics building and study by light with the stars above you. So the advantage of having portable material is that you can seek out the places that will reduce the total amount of time you have to study, not that you can now do more studying.

I'm all about figure out what work needs to be done. Why am I doing the studying this way? Is this the fastest way, the best technique, or am I just spinning my wheels? And when do I want to do this work? You make that plan, you execute. That's the key to getting good grades without burning out. And that's what I recommend in that book. That's what I recommend on those early blog posts.

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on earth for coffee. And you can find out more atcommeatier.com slash deep. Let's move on with a question from Kevin. Kevin asks, what category of things do you track on your Trello board? Well, as Kevin is hinting, and we've talked about many times before on this show, I organize my tasks on task boards. I happen to use Trello. There's other software that can do the same thing. Here's my setup.

I have a unique board for each of my different professional roles. So right now, for example, I have a board for my computer science research as my researcher role. I have a board for my administrative and teaching roles as a professor. So I sort of separate out those two things. There's a lot of work involved with getting classes together and other sorts of administrative details of being a professor. That's one board, a separate board for the research I do as a professor. And then a separate board right now for my work as a writer. I'm actually thinking about perhaps differentiating that into a board that focuses just on writing

and another board that focuses on all the details of running the media, the fledgling media empire that is what I facetiously call Cal Newport Studios. And I haven't yet, but I might. There's other times I've had other boards. I've mentioned before during my stint as the director of graduate studies for our department, that got its own board because it was a whole separate role. So I have a board pour rule. There are some standard columns I use on almost every board.

On almost every board, I'm going to have a column for things that need to be processed. So I don't even really know how to get my arms around this thing that just fell on my plate. Someone just came and said, hey, we have to figure out how to promote this new minor that we're going to be, you know, launching as a program. And I don't even know what that means and how we promote it, but I don't want to keep track of it in my head. I have a column where I can put that card. And that's a column I can come to and say when I'm doing my weekly plans, I need to start process. processing some of these things, like figuring out what it means and making them more specific. I usually have a column for definitely do this week.

So when I'm doing my weekly plan, I'm going to move cards onto that column that I definitely want to do this week. I always have a waiting to hear back from column. This is one of the secrets to my success. And by success, I mean success in trying to prevent undue anxiety. If I am waiting to hear back from a colleague on something, an administrator on something, I sent a note to a dean, and I need to make progress. on this thing, but I'm waiting to hear back from this person. I don't believe in just saying, well, they'll email me back at some point, and that's when I'll

remember to work on this. I put a card in that column under the proper role. Okay, I'm waiting to hear back from this person on this thing, so I don't forget it. And again, these digital cards you can attach information to, so it gives me a place to keep track of all that information. So that's been useful. If I have a regular meeting setup associated with a role. So, for example, when I was a director of graduate studies, I would

meet with the program coordinator every week. I would meet with the department chair every week. I would have a column to gather things to discuss at that next meeting that we would have. This is another hack that goes a long way because it reduces a tremendous amount of asynchronous back and forth digital communication. Because your instinct in the moment, let's say you're in a director role like I was. This thing came up. A student asked me something. I don't know the answer. My program coordinator might know the answer. The instinct is to say, let me just shoot off an email because you know what, in the moment now it is off your head. It's out of your mind. This is obligation hot potato, throw, tag, you're it. The problem is that email is going to come back. And they're going to say, oh,

what do you mean by that? And they're going to have to email them back and they're going to email you something else. And now you have an asynchronous back and forth conversation going on that's causing context shift after context shifts. You feel good in the moment when you throw the obligation hot potato to someone else. But in the end, you're still going to end up burning your hands because this thing is going to be thrown back and forth, back and forth. So what's better to do is say, let me just put this note in the column for discuss that next meeting. And a bunch of stuff builds up in that column. And when you get to that next meeting, you go through it and you make progress and solve all these problems.

It's out of your head and there's no asynchronous back and forth. So that works for me as well. And then sometimes I will have columns that are specific to large or ongoing initiatives or projects. So there's a backburner column where it's just a bunch of stuff that's uncategorized. You know, sometimes I will add a column if it's a podcast, for example, in my rider board.

This is an ongoing project. There's a lot of things that I have to do for it. It's not going to wear any time soon, so why don't I put those into its own column? But really, this has to be something that's pretty longstanding. Otherwise, I just keep these tasks showing up in the back burner.

The very final piece of advanced advice I'll give about using task boards is I consolidate. Digital cards on digital task boards are versatile. So if there's 10 small tasks,

let's say associated with getting my original podcast studio up and running, I don't want 10 small cards. I will probably

have all of those tasks and the affiliated information on one card and I will highlight in the card description, you know, what's the next task? So I can move this card

onto my, I'm doing this week and maybe put a note on it like, okay, I want to get two more things done from this list because I don't want

500 little cards on these taskboards. So if you consolidate, they really don't get out of control. All right. So that is how I organize my taskboards. All right. I think we have time for one more question about deep work. And this one comes from Rachel. Rachel asks, hi, Cal, I'm an undergraduate student.

And I realized recently that I want to follow an academic career. Do you have any tips for a novice researcher? Which skills are the most important in the academic? field. Thanks. Well, Rachel, as an undergraduate, if you want an academic career, and I'm assuming you're thinking about a traditional academic career, a 10-year track job at a university, maybe a research-focused university, the classical idea of what it's like to be a professor, my far the most important thing you should think about right now is being the best student in your major in your grade. Being a star in your field is going to be your first.

step of many steps towards becoming a professor, a classical tenure track professor. If you were one of the best students in your program in your grade, that is what's going to get you the type of recommendation letters that will put you into a top graduate program, because that's going to be step two. You want to get into the absolute best graduate program possible. The academic market is incredibly competitive. If you want a tenure track job, you essentially need to be a star on the market, which means if you're not coming from a top school, you're basically already out of luck.

You have to be a star at your department as an undergrad to get the letters that gets you into a school that gives you the chance of being a really strong grad student at a very strong program. Once you're in grad school, that's where really the research is going to very much matter and you're going to have to pick up what is my specialty and pick up the skills, etc. But let's put that aside for now. So that's your goal number one, become a star in your field. How do you do it? Well, I used to write about this on my blog.

under schedule. All right. Now, it's very important for what you're trying to do to make sure that you have more than enough time for your major classes. Don't double major, don't triple major, don't do seven minors, don't join 19 clubs. If you want to be an academic, there is no admissions officer in your future that's going to say, I love the diverse amount of activities that this person did, and they seem like a really hard worker.

They don't care. If you're going to apply to grad school, it's professors looking at your application. Is this person a star? So get rid of all the other stuff. Focus on your main major. Make your schedule easy. So the courses outside of your majors, make sure that they're of a completely different character so you don't overload or burn out. If you have credits that you can deploy here, maybe AP credits, for example, that would allow you to essentially buy out of some classes, take a lighter than normal load some semesters, do that, maybe do an independent study.

You want to be giving yourself excess amounts of time for your classes. so that you can get it done and go back and look at your work and then read some stuff on your own and just really be someone who stands out. That is the most important thing you can do. Two, depending on the field, you want to go to graduate school for some demonstration that you are capable of self-directed research is important. So get involved with undergraduate research with the best person you can in your department. This is not so much about the specific work I'm going to do is going to convince, to grad school, like, oh, we want, in this case, Rachel, to come do this same work. It's showing them, I was able to work with a professor.

They could give me things to do when I did it. You want one of your letters when you applied to grad school to say, Rachel worked with me on this project. This is an advanced project. She was doing graduate level work. I could count on her. She did high quality work. That's what they want to see.

And they want to see that you are a star. So those are my two main points of advice. The third thing I would say is care about, of course, your GREs, if you're applying to a program where that matters. when I was applying for computer science grad schools for the top schools that cared about GREs, basically what we were told is you need very close to a perfect score on the math

jury. Don't worry about the writing. Don't worry about the verbal, but you need 7-7, 780, 790, preferably an 800 on the math. That's just a cost of doing business. So there's just a step of just doing that studying, that familiarity with the GRE so you can hit those scores. So become a star. Do research not to change the world, but to prove that you can take directions and are responsible and figure out what GRE score you need to get to the schools you want to get to. Do those things, Rachel, and you're giving yourself the best possible chance of kicking on. And with that, let's move on to some questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Lena, who says, what would you recommend to those who don't have a mentor?

You mentioned a couple of times the necessity to have a mentor, especially in an academic career, but I'm very unfortunate in this regard. My PhD supervisor is far from being a star in his field and has very poor supervising skills. Well, Lena, usually what I advise is that if you don't have a good mentor, get a good peer group. I mean, actually, this is quite common. This was, for example, relatively standard in the theory group, at MIT where I was doing my doctoral training. It was very peer group focus. So you would assemble a collection of collaborators of fellow graduate students in postdocs.

And you would work with them to come up with ideas and create new research directions. Now, I think this was common in particular in the theory group because, A, the type of work we did was such that you didn't need, for example, a really well-funded physical laboratory. You weren't tied to a grant in the way you might be if you worked in a biology lab where it says, look, we hired you to do these assays. We need you to do these assays. There's a lot more flexible when you're doing mathematics. But also, these professors in that department were very famous. And they had famous people things to do. These were really big named scholars.

There was multiple Turing Award winners. There was multiple Genius Grant award winners. They often had large research groups. And so there was just a real culture of come up with an almost entrepreneurial startup-like collection of peers to work with. And in fact, a lot of my work was done that way. I did a lot of good work with my advisor as well. But I did a lot of work with these peers, many of whom I still collaborate with today. So, Lena, this is a known model, and it's what I'm going to suggest to you.

Find other researchers who are doctoral students or postdocs that you like that are interesting, that are working on interesting things. and start working on interesting things with them. I think you can learn quite a lot that way. I know you mention your question that I advise, always getting a mentor in academia. That's not actually something I advise. I think it's fine, but I don't think it's a necessary condition for success.

So look for the people around you you can control, make them as good as possible. We have a question here from Powell, who asks, How do you find the balance between physical and digital in productivity? What is the line that pushes a task or process to be physical or digital? Well, Powell, for me, when I think about physical artifacts, so let's say a really good notebook and pen, for example, I tend to think about these being appropriate for contemplative activities, activities that are going to benefit from slowing down and giving something careful, reflective thought.

On the other hand, when I think of digital tools involved with the organization of my life, I think of efficiency as what's at play here. Okay, I've got a tool where I can capture everything and move things around and get information in there so I can minimize the time I waste on that type of organization so I can spend more time actually executing. So typically most of my tools, most of my tools in my workday are digital. That's where I keep track of my calendar and where I have my task boards. and I write out my quarterly plans are stored in digital documents, but then I shift the paper for my daily time block plan because as I'm going through my day, there are going to be points where I want to slow down.

I'm trying to think something through. I'm trying to understand a book chapter, and I want to be away from efficiency and towards contemplative, so I go towards a physical artifact. I'm also big on these physical analog artifacts for non-professional reflection and planning. So this is why I use a paper,

moleskin notebook to keep track of ideas about living a deeper life. It's the right modality for that. That's a contemplative question. That's a question that's going to be serviced by time. There's going to be serviced by slowing down. The same way that would be serviced by slowing down, I wouldn't want to use a physical notebook,

let's say, to keep track of all my task. Because often when I'm trying to get to my task and figure out what I should be working on in this 30-minute window I have free, I don't want to be slowing down. I don't want to be flipping through pages. I don't want to be recopying tasks from one page or another. I want that to be as fast as possible.

I want efficiency. So that's how I balance it. When it comes to efficiency, digital. When it comes to highlighting contemplativeness, I'll go with the analog artifact. Our next question comes from JJ, who asks, when reading nonfiction books, do you suggest reading for quality or quantity? Well, both, depending on the book. That's the typical way I do it. Depending on what the book is and what I'm trying to get out of it will dictate how carefully I go through it.

It will dictate whether I am marking it up with my annotation so I can come back later to extract insight. And if I am marking it, it will dictate to what level of detail I am making those marks. So, for example, earlier in this particular show, I talked about the books I had read this month. So one of the books I read in there was a relatively academic tome called Moralizing Technology. This was a book on digital ethics where I really wanted to understand this somewhat complex philosophy. I read that slow and it was very carefully annotated. I'm marking off passages. I'm numbering things.

I was adding notes to the margin. That same month, I also read a book called Why We Get Sick. On a whim, I'd heard the author interviewed. It was a book about insulin resistance and healthy eating. I didn't annotate it at all. I just said this would be interesting, and I read that pretty quickly. But I learned a lot,

and I got some tidbits out of it, and it was a good thing to read, but it really was something that I was moving quickly through. So I would say the book itself and the purpose that it's going to play in your life should dictate how slowly you read it, how carefully you take notes,

how seriously you take that experience, and with that in mind, you should have a real mix, moving back and forth between really hard books and more breezy pragmatic nonfiction books, though in a novel here and there, I think that diversity of reading types is going to support a much larger throughput

of actual reading. Our next question comes from Kevin. Kevin asks, how do you apply some of your ideas to make sure your family can pursue a deeper life? He elaborates that he is a director of engineering and a SaaS company, but he also has a,

wife and three kids and he says while I feel that my professional life is a minimal to productivity techniques and systems I often struggle to feel and control of the day-to-day aspects of my family life. I would love to hear more about any techniques and systems you and your wife used to get your arms around all of the obligations and chores that come along with family life and how you free up more time to pursue a deep life together as a family. Well, Kevin's a good question. I think the intersection of family life and deep life is something that a lot of people are thinking about these days, especially on the other end of this pandemic and all the disruption that it created.

I will start by saying, I'm not an expert on this topic. I think organizing and making the most out of family life has unique challenges to it. So you can't just take ideas that might work in the world of work and directly port them over. Trust me, I've tried to get my three-year-old to be a better time block planner and his management of his Trello boards is really quite horrendous. He's not doing a good job of capturing task lists on the back of the digital card. So it really just doesn't work. I'm going to recommend a couple books, and then I'll mention a couple of things that we do do in our family.

And again, I can't say it's the best advice, but some things we do. But let me start with some books from people who know more about this. One is Emily Oster's new book, The Family Firm. Emily Oster is an economist at Brown. She applies really interesting data-centric, hyper-logical approaches to questions that take place in life outside of the world of work. So obviously for nerds like me or like you as a director of engineering at a SaaS company, might appreciate this. So the family firm is applying a data-driven approach to try to make lots of decisions about family life. I haven't read it yet, but I like Oster, and I'm sure it's a good book.

You might also want to check out the work of my friend Laura Vandercam. She's written quite a few books that are at least close to this area. Probably the book that is most in this area would be 168 hours. It's based off of a lot of interviews and time logs she did with people. And she has some really interesting ideas in there about what to do with the time in your week. One of the big headline ideas from that book is basically to the extent that it is at all financially possible, basically outsource and automate as much of the more, drudgery focused household work that you can, that this is actually a really good strategy and something that we shouldn't think of as

unusual or elite, but actually should be at the core, especially if you have two working parents, what can we hire someone else to do that we don't actually care about doing ourselves? So check out that book as well. Now, when it comes to what my family actually does, I mean, there's a couple ideas I can think through that might be useful. You know, one thing we try to do is keep one weekend day clear. So when we're working on activities for the kids, we've been doing that this fall, for example, and it's been quite successful where we keep Saturdays clear of any sort of I have to drive you to this place for this whatever sporting event.

Keep it clear of that. Let those happen on Sunday. And that's been really nice to have a completely open day because then we can do whatever. Go see the grandparents. Let's go for a hike. you know, let's go to a movie, whatever it is. I think that's been a nice, relaxing trend that we've inject into our lives.

The other thing I'm real big on, and this is probably a battle I'll end up losing at some point, is really trying to keep activities minimized. I think it's important that each of the kids always has something they're doing, especially at their ages, something physical, because otherwise they will literally run up the walls and be ripping drywall from the ceiling by the time we get to bedtime. But one thing is enough.

You know, it's really easy when you hear about these different activities, like, well, they would like that and this would be enriching for them. And yeah, that would be kind of interesting and they should do that as well. But the overhead of actually getting people to these places, driving the kids to the places, waiting there, the fragmenting of your schedule. Now that evening's gone. Now this evening's gone. Now we have something in the middle of the day this day. It's way, I think, underestimated the cost of that overhead. So we've been trying to the extent possible to say, well, why don't you play baseball this fall?

And that's good. And yeah, Boy Scouts might be fun. Robox Club seems interesting and, you know, maybe there's this enrichment thing that your school's offering. But you know what? Let's just not do any of those things. And we're usually happy when we succeed with keeping that limit because when you have enough kids, one thing per kid takes up a lot of time already. So those are some hacks that we deploy. But check out those books. Check out Oster's book. Check out Vanderkem's books. You'll get a lot more, let's say, well thought to advice on this important question. I think we have time for one more question. This one comes from Ezra. Ezra says, is it really a deep life if it's entirely focused on my local community? As Ezra then elaborates, when you talk about the deep life, it sounds to me often utilitaristic, I think you might mean utilitarianistic, in the sense that all the buckets you mentioned have the purpose of making me feel good, satisfied, connected, etc. But what about the people we do not get in direct contact with? Shouldn't that be part of a deep life ethic, one that urges us to care about all of humanity?

Of course, it makes no sense to talk about social injustice and then ignore the needs of the people in our immediate neighborhood, but shouldn't that be a step after looking further? So Ezra, when we're thinking about the different buckets of the deep life, it sounds like we're honing in here on the community bucket. I do often talk about when I give examples about overhauling that area of your life, getting involved in giving back to people in your immediate community. But I think you're absolutely right that there are broad interpretations of community as well that are important. So at the most narrow interpretation, community is going to be your family. All right.

These are my kids, my wife, my siblings. This is a really big priority. I want to make sure that I am serving them. I am there for them. Then we move out to a slightly broader scope. And you get to your friends. These are people I know and like and spend time with. These are my friends.

I want to be there. I want to serve them. Someone has a kid. I'm going to go over there. I'm going to help them. I'm going to cook them dinner. Someone gets sick. I'm going to be there to make sure that the errands get done,

that their car oil still gets changed. Broaden out further. And you get to your geographically proximate neighborhood and community. Okay, here's the town I live in. Here's the suburb I live in. I want to be involved, right? This is where you might also have community group

involvements, my church, a volunteer effort that I do. So now you're dealing with, these aren't maybe your close friends, but people who have some sort of geographical proximity to you. Beyond that, relevant to your question, the scope will broaden to serving people in the broad broader human community. And this is where you might be involved in causes or issues that have no real relevant geographic proximity to you.

I'm working on climate change issues. I'm working on issues with injustice and prisons or something where now you are outside of these are people that are actually related to me or around me all the time. And I think that could be really important as well. And when you're doing an overhaul of the community aspect of your deep life, that needs to be in the mix. The one thing I will say, though, and I'm far from the first person to note this, is that moving in order from the narrowest scopes towards the largest scopes

is almost always the recipe for making the most sustainable long-term impact. If you jump past your family, past your friends, past local organizations, and your geographically proximate neighborhood straight to global issues that you want to be involved in. That's a risky move. Because you don't have this foundation. You don't have this foundation of what it feels like to sacrifice on behalf of others. You don't have the empathy.

You don't have the patience born of this actual much more, let's call it human compatible type community service. I say human compatible just because it's what we're wired to expect to actually see eye to I and spend time with the people that we are, that we are serving. You want to build that foundation, then you can better serve the larger causes. You get your local house in order, and then you can go build houses for others as well. This tends to be the right way to do it.

Now, the internet, because it has erased, obviously, the obstacles of distance with low-friction digital communication, has created a moment in which we can skip those early steps up until about 30 years ago. I mean, this was what community was going to be, because it wasn't easy to, to be involved with a cause halfway across the country because you couldn't talk to the people over there. You couldn't find out about it. But now you can be on Twitter opining on anything anywhere.

You can be right in the mix on national political issues, national causes, international causes. This is really new. 30 years ago, you might be upset with the president, but you didn't really have a lot of time in your life spent talking publicly about the president or what you don't like about the president because who was going to listen?

Your neighbors and your wife at some point would say, like, okay, I get it. You know, like this isn't interesting. But today you could be on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you've been Instagram. Everyone's involved at all these different levels. That opens up a lot of opportunities for a lot of good. It opens up a lot of opportunities for a lot more people to get involved in advocacy. That's all great. But as with all things that are new, there are dangers.

And I think this is the danger here is that if you're 23 and you jump past all those lower scopes of community so that you can weigh in on Putin, that is going to be an unstable foundation for trying to give back and trying to serve. On the other hand, if you have the patience and empathy and experience of serving your family, serving your friends, serving your local community, and then on top of that,

can really get involved in something that's larger scale, something that you would have had a hard time being involved in a pre-internet world, that involvement is going to be, I think, not only much more successful, but also more meaningful for you. you're going to be able to extract more out of it. You're going to be able to approach it with more of a moral maturity.

So I don't mean to turn my answer here into a rant because basically all of this stuff is good. No one is going to be upset at anyone for giving back to the community at any scale. And it's better to be doing some of that than none of that like so many do. But that tends to be my advice. Don't forget the old-fashioned human compatible. I can see you, look you in the eye. I am servicing and serving you, even though sometimes you say things that annoy me. we don't belong to exactly the same tight ideological, geographical, geographically sorted tribe.

Like, yeah, my neighbor down the street is odd as far as I'm concerned in this way. But you know what? I'm still helping them because they're going through a hard time. I think it's really, really important. And we should not allow the easy access we have to the sort of low friction advocacy that's on unlimited scale. Don't let that get in the way of the harder local eye-to-eye community service. do them both, start with the local, but then also move on to the global. That would be the recipe I'd recommend.

All right, well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in their questions. I will be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.