Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 148: LISTENER CALLS: Decoding the Productive Pause

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP DIVE: Decoding the Productive Pause [2:43]LISTENER CALLS:- Finding a research interests.  [10:00]- Trading moments of your life for money. [13:23] - Scheduling more deep work. [23:14]- Handling the difficult switch from work to leisure and then back again.  [27:30]            - Creating temporal Eudamonia Machines.  [32:31]      - Leading a new team away from email.  [39:14]Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, 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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Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. episode 148. Today, as we typically do on Thursdays, I'm going to answer some calls from you, the listeners. Just a reminder, you can leave your own listener calls by going to CalNewport.com slash podcast. There are instructions there for how to do it. It's quite easy. You can do it straight from your computer browser, and we appreciate all the calls we get.

So I have a good collection of calls that go through today, but before, we get into them, I want to first do a deep dive. In today's deep dive, I want to step away from the cultural commentary and barely suppressed rants that I have been focusing on in recent deep dives and get back the basics and talk about a practical topic, a topic that is related to productivity. In particular, I've been really interested recently in the power of of pausing. Let me explain what I mean here.

I'm going to give you a vignette from my typical life, okay? So once or twice a day, I need to go through my email inbox, see what's going on, see what people need for me, get people the information they need. I don't like dealing with my inbox directly. There's too much in there. So I typically will go through and copy into a text file, quick summaries of all the different things in there that require my attention. I can summarize them in my own words.

So maybe it's this person needs to set up a meeting time. I need to follow up with this person about a particular issue. This person has sent me a note about textbook adoptions, et cetera, right? So things that people need usually represent as emails. I write them all out on a separate text file. If I then say, let's just start executing these tasks one by one, David Allen style. One, two, three, four, five, right? They each maybe just take one minute to five minutes, depending on.

know how complex they are. None of them in isolation are really that onerous. You know, I got to look at my calendar. I got to figure out an artful way of saying no to a request, et cetera. So why not just go through these one, two, three, four, five. I often cannot do that. I gridlock. I'm mentally gridlock.

I can't, I just stare at it. I can't make progress at all. I can't even get started. What my mind wants to do is, can't we just default? Let's go back to the inbox. I just default to something easier. Maybe there's something in there we can answer right away, something that requires just a really quick answer,

like yes, or things we can just archive. It wants to do anything but starting to crank those widgets. Now, how do I get out of that issue? Well, here's what I typically do. I put them into categories. Well, why don't we take similar types of events and put them next to each other in the text file,

then have a couple blank spaces and gather other types of events? So maybe there's three or four things on that list that all have to do with setting up meetings. I'll put those all next to each other. And maybe there's a couple where I have to artfully decline something. Let me put those next to each other. Okay, there's one or two things that I don't really know what to do. Like someone's asking me a question.

I don't really know what the next step is. Let me put those in a category together. And then I walk away. I take a pause. And I come back and just tackle one of those categories. And then I walk away. I take a pause. I go for a walk.

I kind of think it through. I catch my breath. five minutes, maybe 10 come back and boom, boom, boom, boom, and I go right through those. Then I take a pause and do the same thing for the next category. By walking away from the work and then returning, somehow it becomes easier. Now, there's a lot of different terms people might use to describe this strategy. One term that shows up often in the productivity literature is the productive pause. You'll see that phrase show up in multiple different places.

Multiple different people have used it. it's broad, but often it does apply to this circumstance of just taking a step back from your work, pausing, as a way to actually help you do that work better. Now, why does this pausing technique work? Well, this is where I want to throw in a little bit of Cal Newport cognitive science, if you will, because if you look at the treatment of the productive pause online, it's more woo-woo, right? It's, you know, you have to just step back and reflect on what's important and have a sort of disciplined moment of intention. And the whole thing seems a little bit vague and subjective. And I want to give you a much more concrete explanation for why the productive pause unsticks that gridlock. And I think it all has to do with network switching effects.

This, of course, is an idea I go into in a lot of detail in my book, A World Without Email, but something we know about the human brain is that it takes time to switch our target of attention from one thing to a number. another. Certain networks in the brain have to be inhibited. Other networks in the brain have to be activated and this takes time. Now what happens when you're faced with many different things, all from different types of context, you jumble this network switching. Your brain is trying to activate that network and inhibit this network, but this thing needs that network activated, and this one inhibited. And what you get is a neuronal jumble. And how does that feel subjectively? what is the epiphenominal impact of all of this neuronal confusion,

is that feeling of I can't do anything. Your brain just doesn't have the right things properly activated, the right things properly inhibited, because you have all of these things you're seeing all at once, it overloads the circuits. So what then happens when you instead gather these tasks into categories of like types of tasks, look at what the next category is.

Okay, the next one I'm going to tackle is scheduling. I have three things to schedule. That's what I'm doing next. And you walk away. What's actually happening during that time when you walk away where you're taking the productive pause? It's not really about having a moment to re-get in touch with your intention and what's important to you. It's about your brain having the time to finish the network switch. It's about your brain saying, great, we're doing scheduling.

So let's start inhibiting these other networks and getting the scheduling-related networks up and running. And when you get back to your computer, your brain is in the right mode to do that. and now you can boom, boom, boom, you go right through it. It's easy. I could do this all day. Uh-oh, now you have the next category of task. You have to artfully say no to things.

You can't jump right to it because you have the wrong networks activated in your brain right now, gridlock. So you walk away, knowing that that's what you're going to work on next. And what happens when you walk away, your brain resets properly. It's the right networks activated, the right networks inhibited. You come back to the computer screen. Yeah, we're a no-sane machine. We're artfully turning things down. I could do this all day.

repeat, repeat, repeat. So the productive pause is a really powerful strategy. We have known this for a long time. I just don't know that we've been so clear about why it works so well. Brain takes time to switch from one target to another. When you try to interleave multiple unrelated work tasks with each other from one to this and back to this and over to this, when you face, God forbid, a really crowded inbox and just say, let me dive in and start making progress. this is a maladapted way of deploying this neuronal hardware that sits there on top of your shoulders.

Categorize work in the types, one type at a time, prime each type of work before you do it. Okay, this is what I'm doing next. Let me take five and then come back and do it. It might feel in the moment like this will slow things down if I keep walking away from my work, but actually what you were doing is getting the optimal effectiveness out of your brain, and the amount of time it'll take to get through that hole list in the end is going to be. be shorter. All right, and with that, let's move on to our first listener call.

Hi, Cal. My name is Salah. I'm a chemistry major student at KFUBM in Saudi Arabia. I would like to ask about how someone can find his interest in research. Is it by engaging in projects or just by needing papers? And that's it. Thanks. Well, when it comes to research as a student,

student, and this is obviously something that I have some personal experience with, I think it's important that you get involved in a formal student research project. So it's very difficult on your own as a university student to just start reading papers and to feel like you are part of the research community. So typically most schools are going to have some sort of setup that allows students at the university level to get involved in research. Sometimes it's formal. Here is our student research program and you apply and you get a grant. Sometimes it's less formal. You're just talking to specific professors and say, can I be an informal research assistant on your project? I'll just be really useful. But that is what I would recommend.

You want to be formally involved in research with a professor who knows what they're doing, that you are working and helping a actual research project that's moving towards real publication. That's where you're going to learn how things really work. That's where you're going to gain experience. That's where you're going to open up options. The only caveat I'm going to give you, don't be picky. You're not going to be able to have a huge contribution at this level when you're brand new to the research. You're not going to be the one who figures out the double helix structure of DNA.

You're not going to be the one who makes Fermat's last theorem proof actually go through. It'll probably be pretty prosaic what you're actually doing. But what you're gaining is actual exposure to how research works and connection to people doing that research. And so the interestingness of what you have available is going to increase. The very first, I'll just say real quickly, the very first research project I was involved with as an undergraduate, I was literally walking

around campus on Dartmouth. I had a map from the IT department of where all of the various Wi-Fi access points were. I would go to each Wi-Fi access point. I would stand under it and I would open up a program that would sniff packets out of the air and record the signal strength at which they were receiving those packets. And I would stand there and gather data.

And I would name the file with the name of the access point. And then I'd walk down the hall to the next one. And I would do that. And then I'd walk down the hall to the next one. And then I would do that. I mean, it was the boringest possible work. But you know what that gave us in the end was actually a pretty interesting data set where we could look at the signal strength of the beacons between different access

points and then try to figure out how those things varied based on. the distance between those access points and ultimately you're actually able to build an interesting model and a paper came out of that that was called the mistaken axioms, a wireless, was it wireless network research, which has been cited hundreds of times. So it led to interesting places, but the very first thing I was doing was literally the most boring thing you could do, walking and standing still at locations, pressing a button and then pressing that button again. So it'll be boring at first, but get involved with real projects. That's where the cool stuff comes from. All right, so let's move on now to our next call.

Hey, Kyle. I'm Alberto. I'm 25. I currently work as a solutions consultant at one of the big four firms. I once stumbled across your book, Deep Work, and let me say, it really changed my life. I've never felt so understood my whole life. So I was reading about Ben, the University of Virginia grad with the degree in economics, who decided to create his job as a human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer. I follow the same road since I also received the degree in economics and decided to increase my value by learning about programming.

My question to you, Callie, is I feel that I have possessed somewhat valuable skills to the marketplace, hence my background in economics and solving and programming. But I really don't want to be implementing systems tailored to a client's need for the rest of my life. I remember you quoted Henry David Thoreau on digital minimalism. The cost of a think is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it. immediately or in the long run. Well, I really don't want to trade my life just for money. In economics, we call this diminishing return. Do I really want to spend more time of my life working just to get a nicer car or a nicer house? I'll be better off by applying valuable skills to something more meaningful. As someone who has been impacted by your books, I wanted to ask you, do you have

any advice for me as to how to live a more meaningful and valuable life? Thank you, Cal. Well, the first thing I'd recommend is moving back in time in my library of books to the book that I published before Deep War, to the book So Good They Can't Ignore You, which I published in 2012. I think you're going to find some insights in that book that are going to be useful to your quandary. It's also worth keeping in mind that I wrote that book first, and Deep Work in some sense was a response. Just so good they can't ignore you. So a lot of what I talk about in deep work can be put into a broader context, into a context of a life well lived if you also read as predecessor so good they can't ignore you. You're going to find in that book, for example, a case study of someone in a similar position. Her name was Lulu.

She started as a math major. I think it might have been Amherst. It might have been Swarthmore. But she was a math major who taught herself some basic computer programming, got a job in quality assurance. So this is relatively low down on the pecking order. This is testing software. Using some of the skills she was picking up about computer programming, she then automated some of the QA testing.

She began to make herself more valuable. And now she could come up with these automated testing tools that were automating a lot of these processes, and that opened up new opportunities. That led her into mastering database development because there was a natural shift over there, and she became even more valuable because she could now design

these complex database-driven systems. I think she focused in particular on financial institutions, so she really knew how to do this. And what was interesting about this case study in that book is what she did next. She said, great, now that I'm really valuable,

let me take this career capital out for a spin, and she completely reinvented her life into a six months on, six months off structure. Six-month engagement, six-month adventuring, six-month engagement, six-month adventure. And during these adventure months, there's lots of different things she would do.

Her family was from Thailand, so she would sometimes go spend months in Thailand. She learned how to fly a plane. She learned how to scuba dive. She had this cool house they lived in in Jamaica Plain that they were working on. And so what she did here was took her skill out for a spin to build a journey that really resonated with her. That is the basic idea of so good they can't ignore you, that you build skills to get career capital, you then invest that career capital to get in your career the things that resonate and to get away from the things that don't. And this is going to be different for different people.

And so for some people, what resonates is I want to be a master of the universe. I want a startup that is a unicorn. I want to be, you know, a sandhill road raising millions of dollars and winning that competition to be the biggest company in my sector. And for other people, they want to spend six months a year scuba diving or they want to live on land somewhere. I mean, whatever it is that resonates, building skill is going to be the leverage you have to get into your life to things that actually matter. So read so good they can't ignore you because this is a more nuanced approach. I worry listening to your call that you might be falling into the trap of, I don't like this programming, I don't like this job. Let me just quit it and do something completely different.

Let me go start, you know, a vineyard somewhere. If I just completely change my job, then maybe I'll like that. that new job better. This is not a challenge of having the right job. It's the challenge of having the right leverage in the marketplace to make your life what you want it to be. Your building skills as a programmer, great. Take that capital out for a spin. Start thinking through what resonates, what doesn't. What's the lifestyle you want? What's the lifestyle you don't? What do you want in your working life? What you don't? What you want in your life outside of work? What don't you want? And then start figuring out, do I have enough skill to trade to get this in my life? And if not, how do I get that

skill. Anyways, it's a more nuanced approach. Deep work in some sense is a good strategy for acquiring rare and valuable skills. So good they can ignore you. We'll tell you why you want to do it and what you want to do with them. So check out that book. I think you'll like it. All right, let's move on now to yet another call. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Now, if you are using the internet in public without a VPN, you are tempting fate. This is what happens when you connect to that hot spot at a coffee shop or an airport. Your computer or phone or tablet is sending little messages to the website you want to talk to in bundles called packets. Anyone else connected to that same hotspot can see those packets you're sending. They can see what website you're talking to,

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But to get that, you need to go to expressvPN.com slash deep. This podcast is sponsored by My Body Tudor. I've known Adam Gilbert, the founder of My Body Tudor, since 2007, when he used to give fitness advice on my study hacks blog. So I have seen up close as he has built out his amazing company, My Body Tudor. Now, here's how it works. It's a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in how. health and fitness, the lack of consistency. And they do this by simplifying the process into practical, sustainable behaviors,

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Adam wants you to call or text. You can find his personal cell phone number at the top of every page of his website, MyBodytutor.com. That's Tutor Tudor T. Tudor T. So go to MyBodytutor.com today. And if you sign up, Pelham Deep Questions sent you to get that $50 off. Hey, Cal, my name's John. I am a pastor at a local church plant outside of Los Angeles. I'm also a graduate student in theology getting a Ph.D. My question is this. My reading load on a weekly basis is enormous to the point that scheduling two blocks of deep work a day just isn't enough to get all the reading done. That said, I was hoping you could give me some advice about how I might schedule more than two significant sessions of reading per day in order to get

all the work done. Thanks for all the help. Well, I don't think you're going to be able to get much more productive deep work done in a day. If you're already doing, doing two long sessions of hard reading, and you have another job. I think that's probably a realistic limit for your time available and a realistic limit for what your mind can actually do. As I've talked about before, when it comes to really cognitively demanding deep work, so the work that's really straining you, professionals who do this type of work really have two sessions they do a day and that's it.

So this came out of the study of professional violin players that was cited in Anders Erickson work and picked up and popularized in my life. Malcolm Gladwell's work where they were studying the best violin players at this particular academy in Berlin, and among other things, they were trying to characterize their practice habits, and they would do one intense session, break, another intense session, and that's it. What they did not find, for example, in this study was that there was a dose effect where more and more and more practice led to more and more accomplishment with the violin, because there's only so much you could do at that level of intensity, and you might be there. So what do we do about this? Well, you probably need to get more strategic about your reading.

The very first book I wrote was called How to Win at College, and the very first chapter in that book is called Don't Do All of Your Reading. What this means is that at the college level, the grad school level, you have to learn how to be more strategic with your reading. You have to know when to go in and really go slow and understand the argument and where you need to skim, where you can skip an assignment, and where you need to dwell on an assignment, the amount of reading assigned

than a typical program in the humanities tends to be more that can actually be done for most people. So you have to learn how to do some of the strategic slow down, speed up, go deep, go shallow. The other thing you probably have to do is, to the extent that's possible, be more strategic about your course selection. People don't think enough about this.

There's a real masochism out there in higher education where people just put in place on paper the course load they want to do. You know, I want to get this degree fast, and these are all good courses. Let me challenge myself. And yeah, this is five courses instead of four. And these three are notoriously hard. But I want to be the type of person who just goes after it and gets really hard courses and gets things done early. And then you get to the reality of it.

You're like, I can't keep up with this amount of work. And I tend to push the other way. Keep your schedule as easy as possible that still keeps you on track or graduate on whatever schedule you want to. And if that is still too hard, then maybe you need to address. just that schedule and say I'm a full-time pastor and I'm going to have to add another year to my studies here because I can't take a full course load and do my full-time job. That's fine too. This is not laziness.

This is actually giving yourself the cognitive space required to actually do the work that you're doing well. So keep that in mind too. You may have given yourself a heroic schedule because you like on paper being the type of academic hero that has those hard schedules. But in the end, no one cares about how hard your schedule is. No one's going to give you a gold star for taking a fifth course instead of four. no one's going to pat you on the back because you took three really hard courses at the same time.

No one is going to say this is why I'm going to hire you because you had such a hard demands on your time. People just care about what's the degree, what are your grades, how well did you do at the thing you did best. So keep your load reasonable, be strategic about your reading, combine those two strategies. And I think you'll find that you have a little bit more breathing room. Don't try to add a third session. Don't try to be doing seven hours of deep work a day. It's just not going to work out. All right, so good call. Good call. All right, let's move on to our next one.

Hi, Cal. This is Anali. I am a huge fan of your work and have listened to your podcasts and have all your books. My question today is about inertia. So I find that during the work week, I am busy and engaged with work and have a hard time, you know, sort of separating myself and getting into weekend mode. during the weekend, I run around doing fun stuff, housework, recreational activities, and similarly have a really hard time getting myself back into work mode. What do you do about inertia and what is a good way to make that step change from work to leisure and leisure back to work? Thanks for all that you do, and I look forward to hearing your response. Well, this is a good question. I've thought about this because I've had similar issues with it's hard to relax or it's hard to go back to work.

I get this. I actually think there's a lot of useful wisdom to be extracted from the Jewish tradition. And I do feel bad that we're sort of bastardizing here is something that has a rich theological history to apply to issues of productivity. But that caveat in place, if you look at the Shabbat, Havdala tradition in the Jewish tradition. What you have here is a ceremony that kicks off the beginning of the weekend, that kicks off the Jewish Shabbat, which is Saturday. But it is a rituals that begin in preparation for the sundown Friday. So sundown, Friday, sundown Saturday, that's Shabbat.

And during the period of Shabbat, there's no work you're supposed to do. There's various restrictions that depend on exactly what type of Jewish tradition you follow. It's different. It's a day of rest. But there's ritual that is done in the lead-up to Shabbat starting. You clean the house. There's candles that you light. There's prayers that you say there is wisdom in that wisdom tradition, right?

This is a, we're going to go through certain motions to accomplish exactly this goal of changing our mindset away from the prosaic and towards the theological, away from the everyday and towards the heavens. the same carefully designed rituals executed the same time each week, go a long way towards shifting your mindset. You can imagine having something similar. Friday night, we do this preparation for sundown. This is where I'm going to shift into weekend mode, something you do every Friday. Whatever the equivalent is you want to create for lighting those candles

and saying those prayers and cleaning the house, I think could be very effective. The Jewish tradition then has the Habdok. dollar ceremony after the sun goes down on Saturday for ending Shabbat and it involves candles and other sorts of things. Well, from my productivity perspective, you should have a similar ritual for the ending of the weekend. And maybe this makes more sense on Sunday, right?

But I'm going to go through some sort of ritual to say I'm leaving relaxation mode. And probably what could happen during this ritual is weekly planning. This seems like a natural way to end the weekend mode. You're saying, I'm now going to not just jump into a mom. on email and I'm trying to work. I'm going to jump into looking at my quarterly plan and looking at building my weekly plan alpha that, trying to get a sense of what's coming on this week, what's going to happen, what's on my plate.

It's actually like a fantastic transition back into the world of productive efforts. Some people do this Sunday night. Some people do this Monday morning. I like to do it Monday morning so that I can leave my footprint of the weekend bigger, but it does eat up time on Monday morning. So however you want to do it. But you put those two ideas together. and I think we have a pretty nice ritual here for transitioning in and out of relaxation.

So to summarize, have something you do on Friday at the end of the workday, something ceremonial, something physical, we clean the house, we have a glass of wine, we go out and have dinner at the same restaurant, I go to the same dive bar where the regulars are, whatever it is, that you do to ritualistically switch into weekend mode. By the way, do a really clean shutdown before you start that. don't leave open loops. Make sure your mind is completely happy. There's not an email we missed. That's critical. There's not work that needs to be done this weekend that I forgot about, that you can close those open loops,

do the ritual. Then in that weekend, using the weekly plan alternative, our sort of bastardized, secularized, hobdala, I'm going to sit down and build my weekly plan. It's going to take me about 30 minutes to an hour,

and that's going to put me back into work mode. I'm not just jumping into it, cold turkey. All right, so that's my suggestion. We all should be a little bit more Jewish when it comes to how we manage our weekends. All right, let's move on now to another call.

Hi, Cal, this is Omar Ansari. Hope you're doing well. So I love your book, and I've got the whole team reading it, and we've even started a book club at work. I was reviewing your first principle, and it talked about eudaimonium machines. And, you know, the thought occurred to, me, these are five rooms. And what if you were to transplant these concepts, these five different

stages into weekdays? And the thought occurs to me because at work, we've instituted this no meeting Friday approach. So we literally have created this space for folks to have deep work. I'm wondering if we can actually step through the five stages in a chunk-like fashion. This is what we need to work with those three 90-minute sessions on Friday, and we build Monday through Thursday through that day. So I was wondering if you have any thoughts around that approach and any ideas. Thank you so much and keep up the good work. Well, Omar, first of all, I appreciate the bird sounds in the background.

From best I can tell remotely, it seems like a flock of birds was murdering a deer. Do I have that right? Or maybe it was a flock of birds Was repairing a motorcycle? But anyways, you brought the bird sound commitment up to a new level, so I do applaud you for that. All right, so let's talk about the Utamodia machine. This is architect David DeWain's idea of the Utamonia machine.

I was actually just talking to David earlier today. He sent me a really cool Emerson quote that I might do something with. Can we move the Utimodia machine from spatial to temporal? Can we move the rooms of the euda monia machine into days of the week? I will say my first instinct here is caution. All right. If you do, and I'm going to use your example, if you do something like no meeting Friday, these have been tried a lot, and they failed a lot.

And why do they fail a lot is if you have not fixed the underlying nature of your work, to make that possible, it's going to create problems. And what I mean by that more specifically is if, like most organizations, you use the hyperactive hive mind workflow as your primary means of coordination and collaborations that's on the fly ad hoc back and forth, haphazard communication, this is how we make things happen. When you then try to put in these bigger constraints, such as, you know, on Friday, we don't do meetings, on Tuesdays we don't send emails, it can cause issues

because it's actually these impromptu emails and meetings that makes progress in the work and the work slows down and things can't happen and the friction builds up and the heat gets hot and then the constraints go away. So what I recommend is if you're going to do any type of shaping, temporal shaping of how work unfolds,

when communication happens, when meetings happen, when emails happen, the rules have to be supported by underlying processes. You have to have an alternative way for work to happen that's clearly specified that works just fine if no one has meetings on Friday or if no one can send emails on Tuesday. So this is my concern when I hear just a casual idea of like, well, we could take something

like the rooms of the euda monia machine and make them in the days because that's putting huge constraints on what is allowed to happen in different days. And those constraints will fail if you don't rethink from the ground up how work actually happen so that they can fit within those constraints. And that's a big point that I want to put out there in my answer is that the processes for work drive everything else. You cannot solve the problems that are created as a side effect of the hyperactive hive mind by just treating those side effects.

You can't say, man, we get too many emails. So let's put a rule that says let's send less emails. You can't say, man, we're in so many Zoom meetings. Let's have a rule that says less Zoom meetings. you're treating the fever without getting to the underlying infection. In this case, the underlying infection is these haphazard back and forth on-demand communication sessions are the only way that you have in your organization to get work done. So I care more about the underlying processes than the rules you have for how many meetings we can have, email, etc.

That being said, I do like the general idea of finding different ways of operationalizing the philosophy that is embedded in David Duane's eutamonian machine. The machine is a concrete proposal. It's also a philosophical proposal. The idea that you could actually think intentionally about how you actually approach the task of creating value with your brain and taking the function of the brain and the human being as an integral part of your thinking about work phase construction. When David talks about having a shower, you go through ritualistically before you go into a chamber to really think your deepest. thoughts. I mean, this is in part a philosophical acceptance of this is a really complicated, interesting, deeply human thing we're asking people to do and we should maybe give it some

ritualistic respect. And so I think more vaguely this is a good idea that we should have more respect in how we construct our work days to actually respect how human beings function and what we're asking human beings to do and how the human brains actually operate and what's a good or bad way to work with these brains. Maybe to add a little bit more of mystery into what we're doing to add a little bit more of a code of honor into thinking or whatever we want to do. I think this is not a bad idea. But just keep in mind again, the scale at which these changes have to operate is on the underlying processes for how work gets done.

If jumping on Slack, jumping on email, or sending out Google invites for a Zoom, if this is the primary way that almost all work gets done, you can't have much success making any other changes. So if you start with the processes, you can remold your work however you want. You can make your own instantiations of the eutemonea machine of radical novelty, of radical effectiveness, whatever you want to do if you're starting your work from the underlying processes and rebuilding those from scratch to directly support whatever this vision actually is.

All right. That was good. Let's move on. I think we have time for one more. call. Let's do one more call here. Hi, Cal. My name is Aaron. I'm a health insurance actuary, and I manage a small team. The company I work for requires managers to periodically rotate to new positions every three to five years, and my next rotation is occurring over the next month. I would like to know if you have any thoughts or suggestions on transitioning to a new job

with a new team, particularly in the context of being a new team leader for a team that already has established workflow. What should I focus on in the beginning to make sure my tenure this new rule was as effective as possible. Thanks. Well, I would say right off the bat, what you want to try to do is surface all of the implicit processes that makes up the work that this new team does. Now, you're not going to approach this challenge from the standpoint of, I'm going to change all these things.

That's going to generate a ton of resistance. No, no, this is just, I'm learning. I really want to understand exactly what we do. So you're going to start out in a real mindset of trying to learn through experience, through questions, through just being around, seeing how things unfold. You want to really figure out these are the different processes that implicitly make up everything that this team does and write them down, have them written somewhere clear. One, two, three, right? You're actually really trying to surface all these processes. Then as a team leader, once you really understand what the team does and you've done the other leadership,

things that I'm not an expert on, but you know, you should know as a leader. I'm sure you do about you get to know the team members. You establish a vision. You're accessible. You're not micromanaging. You're not too distance. All that type of stuff. Or you're, you know, doing the Jocko leadership thing.

So I guess, you know, you're doing a bunch of pull-ups in the office and yelling at people. Actually, I joke. Aside, here's just a quick aside, by the way. I heard a Q&A with Jocko Willick, a business Q&A. It's business people like this. with business questions and blew me away. I mean,

incredibly nuanced and actionable and he knows what the hell he's talking about, which brings me back to a theme that I've talked about on this podcast before, which is, please, please God,

Jocko, don't break me in half. So I always have to be very careful to qualify any joke about Jock with me complimenting him and I do not want him to literally break me in half if we ever encountered each other. So actually,

but that is true. He is a brilliant business. thinker. I was incredibly impressed. So listen to Jocko and tell them, Cal really respects them and doesn't want to be broken in half. But focusing on just this aspect, the aspect that I care about, the aspect about processes, surface all of these processes, write them all down. And once you've established your rapport with the team, now you can actually start having some conversations. Hey, here's all the things I think we do. Do I have that right? Okay, am I missing one? Maybe these two should be combined. Okay, you have that figured out. Then you start talking to the team. So how do we, how do we normally do

these. Like this process over here, we have to, you know, deal with changes to the claim schedule. And what do we normally do when that happens? I'm just curious. Oh, like, we get emailed about it and we have to update these things and who normally does it. Okay. And you're starting to kind of figure out with the team how each of these processes tend to be implemented. Then, again, in conversation with the team, you can start looking at this and saying, you know, I'm wondering if there's some, there's some tuneups we could do here to try to make our lives here better. And this is where now you can enter the punchline, the New Portonian punchline of, let's see if we can reduce context shifts. And by context shifts, our best proxy here is going to be unscheduled messages that need to be answered.

Let's start caring about that when we look at these processes. And you make your case, like the world without email case, you know, context switching is a real drag on the mind. It creates fatigue. It slows us down. It makes us unhappy. So, you know, we want to see if we can reduce the amount of times during the day we to keep jumping from different contexts. So let's look at some of these processes and say,

are there some low-hanging fruit here where we could tweak and I'll agree about the new way of doing this, that's going to reduce context shifts. And context shifts is abstract. So let's use as our main metric we're trying to reduce here. Our proxy for context shifts is unscheduled messages that have to be replied to. Is there a way we could do this that reduces the number of unscheduled messages one of us is going to have to find in our inbox and reply to?

If you get them on board with that, then you get them on board with working together, to come up with some new implementations of some low-hanging fruit things that happen again and again, now you're in. Because once that percolates and people are executing,

they're going to feel that benefit. This is great. You know, it seemed like a small thing, but now we don't just grab each other when there's a new, whatever, actuarial table. We have a set meeting on Thursday for a half hour where we come in and assign who does what, and they automatically go to this drop box folder that's shared,

and they get moved into the finalization folder by Monday morning. Like we've kind of figured it out. Oh, there's all these messages we don't have to send anymore. It just happens. There's a couple of Zoom meetings that disappeared each week. That's kind of nice. Now they're sold and now you can start turning that flywheel faster and faster. Well, here's some other processes.

How can we redo these? And what about these? And it'll get more radical and you get bigger results, which will enable even more radical changes, even fewer context shifts to result. People are happier. They're working better. They're producing more. Their hours are less.

and really good things happen. Revolution has happened in this team, but it begins with the very smallest thing, which is, do I have this right? Are these the different things we do regularly? And can I convince you that context shifting something we should care about? And then can I convince you that this one thing we do, there's a pretty easy fix we can make to reduce contact shifts.

Can we think up a new way of doing this? That's how this begins. You're being clear, you're taking slow steps, and most importantly, you have everyone on this team involved with you on every step of the way. not telling people this is what we're doing now. That's bureaucracy. You're empowering people to come up with a better way of doing things.

That is a smart alternative to the hyperactive hide might. Once that flywheel gets turning, it's going to start turning faster and faster. So that's what I would do. I would focus on the processes. Focus on those. In addition to doing the Jocko stuff, remember you're going to tell Jocko that Cal says very nice things about him, so he doesn't literally break me in half.

And then you focus on the processes. Here's what we want to improve. Let's try it. Let's work together. small improvements will be got larger improvements, which will be got even larger improvements. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, everyone who sent in their listener calls.

I will be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.