Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 151: Should you move to the country?

Episode Date: November 29, 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: Should you move to the country?  [3:55]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- Is it worth time blocking for long projects? [20:11]- What’s your (Cal’s) opinion on bosses stopping by the office to chat?  [22:16]- How can I remember all of your advice? [25:39]- How do I avoid the feeling of just going through the motions? [32:41]- How do I better get started in the morning? [38:31]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- What’s your advice for studying while also working in a warehouse? [44:38]- How can I improve my meditative walks? [50:10]- How can working parents maximize time spent with children? [54:12]- Are you so good you can’t be ignored in computer science?  [58:40]- How do I choose a thesis topic? [1:03:41]  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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C-H-I-L-Sleep.com slash Cal to take advantage of our exclusive discount and wake up refreshed every day. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 151. I'm joined here in my Deep Work HQ, my producer Jesse. Now, Jesse, this episode is coming out after Thanksgiving, but we are recording it right before Thanksgiving,

so are you looking forward to that holiday? Yeah, sure am. I'm going to get a little workout in the morning. I need some good food, watching football. How about yourself? That's the wrong answer. The right answer is family holidays get in the way of deep work.

They are a distraction for what matters more than anything else, which is concentration on work. So you got that one wrong. I think it would be funny if that's just what we made the show, was just me, no matter what the question was, just yelling. Just do more deep work. Yeah, it would be. Let's try it.

All right. You'd be a caller. Give me a call and I'll try out this new format. All right. So here's our next caller. Hey, Cal, how you doing? This is Tony from Austin, Texas. Just wondering if you had any thoughts on Thanksgiving holiday and what people should be doing to spend their time.

Work deeper. See, this is easy. We could get this down to, you could have a few clips of me that we just play. just work deeper get after that deep work shallowness deep work is the is the feeling of weakness

leaving your body shallowness shallowneth is early death email email is worse than the American Civil War in terms of its negative impact on human life and happiness things like that

just sort of real will really be out there all right well anyways this is enough nonsense I got a I got a long deep dive here that somehow integrates me, Bill McKibben, Brene Brown, and a bunch of confused Teamster. So we should probably get right to that. In today's deep dive, we will tackle the question,

should you move to the country? Now, this deep dive is inspired by a recent article I published in The New Yorker that was called The Great Cubicle Escape. Now, the New Yorker piece opens on the story, of the writer Bill McKibben. I like this story because it has some real drama to it. It starts with McKibbon on this arrow-straight trajectory to the very top echelons of American journalism.

He goes to Harvard, becomes the president of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. The venerable New Yorker editor Bill Sean plucks them out of Harvard and gives him a position as a staff writer at the magazine. Sean sees something in McKibbon he really likes and says, McKibbon, I am considering you as my replacement. When I retire, which is coming soon, remember at this point, Sean was in his 70s. When I retire, Bill, you might be the person who takes over. You might take over as the editor of the New Yorker. So in his 20s, McKibin was well on his way to being one of the most important positions

and one of the most important positions of all of American journalism. Looks pretty good, right? Here comes a dramatic twist. The Fleischman family that owned the New York. And yes, that name, if it sounds familiar, it is the same family that is known for Fleischman yeast. The Fleischman yeast fortune had started the New Yorker in the 1920s. At this point, we're now in the 1980s. They sell it.

They sell the magazine, the Sy Newhouse, the newspaper magnate has an empire that eventually became known as Condé Nast. They sell at the Side Newhouse. Cy Newhouse pretty quickly says, Bill Sean, you got to go. You're 78 now. You got to go. oh but you don't get to choose your successor, I will. And Newhouse brings in the book editor Robert Gottlieb. A little aside, the same Robert Gottlieb who edited the adronymus strain for Michael Crichton.

It's all a small world. Anyways, there goes this path that was so clear from Macbun to becoming the editor of the New Yorker. He didn't like the way they handled it, so we quit. And now we have that dramatic turnaround. Everything's going great. then out of nowhere we find McKibbin in his bleaker street sublet jobless with no real plan of what to do next. So the story gets more interesting because he decides why not do something radical. So him and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, moved to the southeast Adirondacks to a small town called Johnsburg, 200-person town.

And they buy this ramshackle old mill house on a creek right outside of town that abuts state land. Hundreds and thousands of square miles of protected forest. McKibbon claims he could walk out his door to Lake Ontario without ever leaving public land from that house. So it's a huge change. And by the way, McKibin is not some outdoorsman survivalist who was uncomfortable in New York City. He knew nothing about the woods. He didn't even know where the Adirondacks were until two years earlier when a colleague had said, hey Bill, I'm supposed to go to a rider's retreat in the Adirondacks.

I can't go. Will you take my place? And Bill said yes, and he didn't even know where he was going. So he just randomly had gone there for a writer's retreat and loved it and said, yeah, let's do this. This is someone who grew up in Lexington, the posh suburb of Boston, right? He doesn't know about the forest. But they're like, hey, let's just, why not?

Let's do this. So they move this ramshackle house in the middle of the forest, wood burning stove, hikes all day, cross-country skiing. And they settle into life in the forest and they just live cheaply. Bill looks back and he's a thorough fan. So he knows, look, you got two ways of managing your household economics. Make more money, spend less money. He said, when you're in the southeast Adirondacks living outside of the 200-person town of Johnsburg, it's easy to spend less money because there's nothing to spend money on.

So they live cheaply and a huge amount of autonomy. So at first they were writing articles. They did a lot of freelance. So both Sue and Bill were very respected freelance writers. and then Bill had a hit when he wrote his first book, The End of Nature, the first book to make climate change accessible to a general audience. Big hit, very influential,

immediately made Bill into a top-level environmental writer. And from then on out, there was always going to be a market for any book he wrote. Not a John Grisham market, not a like, I'm going to make $5 million in every book I write, But because he emerged as an influential writer, whatever idea he came up with in that space, a major publisher would publish it and he would make enough on it to get another couple years of expenses. Their cheap lifestyle up there in the woods.

All right. So I opened my New Yorker piece with that story. And then I say, this was not the first time I've heard that story. I mean, I talked to Bill for the article. Mia Colpa, I wanted to talk to Bill just in general because I'm a big fan. So part of my motivation for even writing this article is how could I talk to Bill. So that was part of it. But anyways, I interviewed him for this article.

And what I said in the piece was, yeah, but that's not the first time I'd heard this story. I knew the story really well because it used to be the centerpiece of the keynote talk I would give about my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you. When I was on the road talking about that book, I used McKibbin as my son. central story to highlight the main ideas from that book. It was the linchpin, the linchpin to the advice that I was giving in that talk. So I gave a talk about Bill McKibbitt in front of all sorts of audiences. Here's a bit of an aside, something I didn't talk about in that article. That was kind of the end of a really cool moment where if you were writing non-business-focused advice, there was a really big conference circuit you would go on. You would go and give talks all over

the country and often to really big crowds. And I don't know if that's still the case anymore. I really haven't done it since so good they can't ignore you. So that tour has a special place, you know, in my memories because it was this period where we'd go to these giant stages and give talks. A lot of these talks were at conferences where it would have been a web community that would then meet in person and have these big conferences. And so for that book, more so than any other book I've ever written, I would go to these theaters

and give big talks. You know, one of my defining memories of this time, and I talked about this briefly in the New Yorker piece, was giving a talk, it was at Lincoln Center, Alice Toley Hall, which is this sort of beautiful hall they have at Lincoln Center, seats over a thousand people, beautiful theater. And I was there for giving a talk on stage. It was, I think, 99 U was having a conference. And this was back then, you could gather a thousand people. These, like, web communities could gather a thousand people to come to these conferences. And I was giving my talk with McKibbin and the whole. whole story. And my defining memory, and this is

tangential, but my defining memory of that was backstage at Alice Toley Hall. And it wasn't a green room. It was like a giant room because I think it's where orchestras would wait before they go on stage, right? So it was like a practice tune-up room. This giant room backstage Lincoln Center. And it's me,

Bray Brown, and a bunch of really confused teamster types. So I remember talking a little bit with Bray Brown and I didn't realize, oh, wait a second, you probably shouldn't mess with someone's concentration right before they go on stage before a thousand people. People have a routine they like to go through.

So she was polite about it, but was basically like, look, I'm nervous. I don't want to talk to you. Okay. And so I talked a little bit with the Teamsters, and they had no idea what was going on. I mean, they're used to the such and such orchestra is in town, the play at Lincoln Center.

The such and such opera company is in town. So they were just amused. Like, why are there all of these young guys with complicated facial hair and haircuts and checked shirts and, you know, non-crease khakis? This was a creative professional conference. And Patagonia Vest, why, what are they doing here? Again, it was this weird moment where all of these online communities crystallized. They'd come together in person with these really big crowds. Like another example of this I gave this talk at was the World Domination Summit run by critical.

screw bro. It came out of a blog, his blog, The Art of Nonconformity, but there, when I did it, you know, back then, we were in Portland, I gave this talk. There was five or six hundred people in a giant theater and people would just gather. So it was a cool period. So the Teamsters were like, I don't know who, why is this kid here?

Why are all these young people here and these with complicated haircuts and weird glasses that look like goggles? Like, what's going on, right? So it was interesting period. And I gave the talk there as well. Anyways, so I was going around giving this talk a lot and Bill McKibbon was at the center of the talk because I it really resonated with me this idea of I'm going to live very

simply and therefore have a ton of autonomy over my time ton of autonomy over my time I can decide you know today I'm going to hike now I'm going to write three days in a row that I'm going to take a month off just complete autonomy over your time in a place of natural beauty it just really resonated me this is when I was transitioning from grad school to professorship I was really wary and worried about administrative overload spoiler alert those were proper concerns for me to have it turns out and that story just really resonated with me so I would give that I would tell that story in my talk about so good they can't ignore you and I fit it to the ideas and so good they can ignore you because I said look here's someone

who really wanted autonomy and to get autonomy he got really good at writing first and because he was good at writing that gave him the ability to live very autonomously right because him and let's be honest actually his wife sue is probably probably a better writer than he is. I mean, she's a road scholar who writes novels and journalism, and right now is a full-time staff writer at the New Yorker. I mean, she's fantastic. So the two of them could, they're so good, they could get freelance articles from the top places and make enough off of freelance writing that they didn't feel like they had the scramble. And then, of course, Bill kicked off this book writing career at the end of nature, which made things even more stable for them. You know, so that was my example. I was like, look, this is someone that they wanted. autonomy over their time and their life. And it wasn't just that they chose to move to the woods, is that they got really good at something rare and valuable and then used that as leverage to build a life that was really autonomous. So that was the centerpiece.

But I just, that specific thing they were going for. Autonomy really resonated with me. All right. So that's how I opened my article. And then I go on to say when I would tell people the McKibben story back then in 2012, Beyonce's tell the story, then talk to people afterwards. it was largely assumed that for most people, even if the specific path that McKibbin followed appeal to them,

it wasn't on the table. The specific idea of moving somewhere remote to live a simple life, that particular path they followed, wasn't on the table because their profession wasn't amenable to it. McKibben was a writer, a freelance writer. That's well suited. living in the woods because your commission editors don't care where you live. You know, so that's well suited to it.

But if you're a professor or a computer programmer or an IT specialist or you run a small startup, you can't, you couldn't in 2012 do any of this stuff without being, you know, near an office, near a city, near a university campus. You couldn't do this stuff anywhere but crowded suburban urban type settings. So a lot of people said, hey, we love, you know, we love your general point about you have to use skills to invest to get things you want. But the specific thing that Bill did about moving to the woods and living simply, that appeals to me, but I can't do that with my job.

And we all agreed that was more or less true. So why this is interesting today is that that has changed. And in the article, I go on to give multiple examples of people who have standard computer and email office jobs who were able to do a MacKibin-type shift. Moving to somewhere remote. Talked about people living on a mountainside in Burr. Vermont. I talked about people living on 40 acres by a river outside of Richmond. I talked about people living in the East Texas Hill country on a property with a barn and a pond.

In all of these cases, they still continue doing to some degree the same work they were doing when they lived in the suburbs in these more remote locations because they now have internet access. Maybe they have a signal booster. They can get on the cell network or they have a high-speed fiber connection, whatever it is. I went through it in these different cases, but more ubiquitous internet connectivity meant these people, these examples who do computer screen and email jobs, could actually still do some of that work from afar. And that could finance them.

That could cover their expenses when they move to a more remote location. I think that's a really important shift. And it wasn't true 10 years ago. It is true today. Now the warning, of course, is that if you move somewhere more remote but then continue with your job exactly the way it was before, it's just you're doing it remote, you lose most of the benefits of moving somewhere scenic like that. If you're on Zoom all day and frantically doing emails, it doesn't matter that you're in the Adirondacks versus Northern Virginia. So that is a danger. But the case studies I profiled in this article followed McKibben's lead where they move somewhere.

more remote, they also simplified their lives. And with their expenses lower, they did not have to work as much. So they could deploy their same hard-won knowledge worker skills to make money, but they could do a lot less of that work and still survive quite nicely. And I think that is an interesting phenomenon. The technological ability to do this is intersecting with this post-pandemic moment where I've been reporting on lots of knowledge workers stepping back and saying, what do I want to do with my work life? So we're questioning what we want to do with our work life at the same time that the Bill McKibbitt option has become less risky and more widely available than it ever has been before.

I think this is an interesting confluence of events. So we'll see. But let me plant that seed. If you're not super happy of where you live, you're a computer screen style office worker, you're tired of the suburbs. You're tired of the traffic, you're tired of the cookie cutter sameness, you're tired of the crowding, you don't particularly like where you live. This option is on the table in a way it wasn't before. You can move somewhere simpler. And by simpler, I mean, it just doesn't have that crowdedness, that competitiveness, that traffic horn blaring, freneticism.

And take the same type of work you do to finance that move somewhere simpler, but because it's cheaper where you're going, you don't have to work. as much. And because it'll be a place where people don't drive all afternoon to bring their kids to 17 different activities, the pace of life will be slower, even outside of work. If that appeals to you, I think that is more available now than it ever has been before. So check out that article I wrote in The New Yorker. Check out Bill McKibben and his story, because I think it's really inspiring. But the way I end to that article is the way I will end this deep dive is that what has caught my attention more than anything else, because I can't predict what's going to happen. Are a lot more people going to follow this path or not?

I don't know. But the thing that keeps catching my attention is that 10 years ago when I would stand on stage, you know, following Bray Brown up to that stage and Alice Toley Hall, and I would tell the story of Bill McKibben, the details of his story were meant mainly to be aspirational. If I was to give that same talk today, the story might read more like an instruction manual. And I think that's an important shift that's happened.

All right, let's do some questions. We'll start as always with questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Sabine, who asks, In your opinion, is it worth time blocking days that don't involve jumping around with different types of tasks? There's some elaboration here. Amin says, I am self-apploid and on a regular basis have days when I work on my routine work projects that can take two days to finish without having to switch to anything else. I think that's completely fine to non-time block really focused days

or days where maybe you're not doing too much professionally, except for maybe one thing. So it's a weekend day that you largely aren't working, but you're going to write for three hours. No need to time block that. Or if it's a regular weekday and you're coding all day. You know, you know what you're doing. You use scrum.

Here's the feature story you're working on. And that's what you're locked into. I think the time block in those occasions, though it's fine, the do might feel like it's an exercise in just formalism. I think it's completely fine not to time block those days. I probably time block 90% of my work days. But there's work days I don't have to. I mean, sometimes it's because it's routine too.

That's the other thing I'll throw in. I mean, I know if it's a Monday for me, I got to drive to campus. I'm going to teach. Then teaching is followed almost immediately by office hours. And then office hours actually take me pretty late into the day. And, you know, sometimes it's pretty clear. I prep in the morning. I go to campus.

I teach. I do office hours. I'll often have maybe one variable block in that day. What do I do right after office hours? And sometimes if that's the only variable that's different, it feels weird to write it down. So I'm with you. Time blocking is useful when it's unclear what you want to do with your time or your plan is way too complicated to keep track of. But if it's one thing or it's a schedule you've done week after week after week with very minimal changes, it's fine by me.

I'm not going to be mad at you if you don't time block that. All right. Our next question here comes from Christoph. Christoph asks, what is your take on the informal stop by the office chat? He notes it's synchronous but also disruptive. Instead of multiple emails, a quick chat with my boss while I walk by his office and he waves me down, gets a quick informal project update. what is your take on these type of informal meetings? Well,

Christoph, there's two different forces that are working cross-current when it comes to this habit of office stop by. So the positive force is that it helps the boss feel more connected to his or her employees. And I think it actually does achieve that effect, right?

It means that you get to have a regular interaction with the people you work with that might not otherwise really happen at all or happen quite infrequently. that does have a social cohesion effect which is positive. The negative force that this creates, of course, is context switching. We now know because we've all read my book, A World Without Email, we've all venerated the book, we all talk about it all the time with our bosses

and buy numerous copies for our friends and relatives in the upcoming holiday season. We all know from that book that there's a really non-trivial cost to having to switch the target of your attention from one thing to another. Christoph, you probably feel a sense of fatigue, cognitive fatigue, after your boss stops by, grabs you, you do an update, and you're trying to go back to the things you're doing, you probably feel that fatigue that makes it hard to get going again. Maybe you just devolve into, let me go into my email inbox. I just don't have it anymore.

That's not random. That's the cost of the attention residue of having to completely switch your cognitive context from whatever you were doing to what the boss is doing. So there's a really big footprint from that that can give you cognitive fatigue and more generally lower your cognitive capacity. So we have a positive and a negative. I think the right thing to do here, my personal opinion, is find an alternative way of accomplishing the same positive benefit of the stop by, is the social cohesion benefit that sidesteps the context switching.

That context switching cost. So what this means is, let's have a regular way that we can talk with each other, but it's predictable. I know when it's going to happen. It's not going to happen in the middle of something else I am doing. If you practice office hours, which I think almost every office environment should, where everyone says on a set days at set times, here are my office hours, my door is open, my Zoom is on, my phone is on. I expect to do nothing in here but to talk to people, call me with questions, stop by my office with questions. If you practice office hours, now the boss can basically circumnavigate those office hours. and now you can get that same effect if you're the boss by saying

I keep track of when all of my different employees' office hours are and I want to stop by each employee's office hours once per week. No disruption because that's the point of the office hours. But you also get that social cohesion I can regularly be talking to you. So I think that's probably the right balance. But you are correct to note that cost you feel, that cost you feel accruing from the stopby's Israel. That's actually a neurological, a quality of the neurological dance that goes on when you have to keep switching your attention from one target to another, then back again.

All right, moving on, we got a question from Don Quixote. Let's see what we have here. Hopefully this is appropriately literary or I'll be disappointed. How can I help myself to remember all of your best advice? Now, that is not appropriately literary. There's no actual Don Quixote illusions in this question. I am disappointed.

Let's go farther here. There's an elaboration. Hi, Cal, I'm making some small improvements to my office space that I'd like to include a nice print that summarizes maybe your top 10 or 20 best pieces of advice for living the deep life, which, in my opinion, should be possible, given your proclivity for summarizing your advice

and easy to remember catchphrases. He then gives us an example that, poster you've probably all seen of everything I really need to know. I learned in kindergarten. And Jesse printed me out a copy of this poster so we can look at it here. Share everything. Playfair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things. You're not yours. I don't know. Let me just say, by the way, this kindergarten poster, I mean, this seems like good advice, but is this really everything you need to know? I mean, what about how to manage your finances or how to deal with like major health problems? I don't see. anything in here about dealing with the inevitable tragedy of the death of those around you who

you know and love. I am going to disagree that everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten. I call Baldur Dash on that. But could there be an equivalent poster for me? Well, Don, I'm going to do your work for you and say that might be quixotic because I do give a lot of advice. But to be honest, the summary I use when I try to capture everything is not 20 pieces of advice is three.

The best summary I have for my deep life philosophy writ large would be do less, do better, know why. Those three categories capture everything I think is really important. So do less.

Focus on the things that matter. Be worried, concerned about over distraction. Be concerned by having too much on your plate. Be concerned by the death of a thousand paper cuts of too much work, Fokai making it difficult to do any one thing better. Be worried about in your life outside of work.

Too many shining distractions taking your attention away from the smaller number of things that are really quality. These are themes to go through all of my books, including my student books, for sure. And so good they can ignore you for sure in deep work, for sure in digital minimalism, even in a world without email. Do better. Care about how you actually execute the things you execute. This is where deep work shows up. For certain things, deep work is much better than shallow work.

Do it without distract. There's also where productivity falls in. If you have these obligations are part of your job, this is what you've decided to do. Organize it. Be smart about it. Don't be haphazard. Don't be reactive. Don't just stumble through your day.

And then the no why is to connect this all to the underlying reasons. I am doing this for that. Here is my vision of my lifestyle. Here are my values. These things we talk about a lot when we talk about the deep life fall under that rubric. of no why. So if you're not doing too much, you have autonomy, time, margin. If the things you do, you do at a high level of quality, you're intentional and organized by the things that maybe are easier but have to happen, and you connect everything to your values to a vision of a life

well-lived, that is basically the deep life. That actually used to be the tagline of my blog, of study hack. So in the beginning, quick digital history of Cal Newport, in the beginning, I wrote my first two books. How to Went to College, How to Become a Straight A Student. How to Come a Straight A Student came out in 2006. In 2007, I launched my website, Kelnewport.com, and it was built on a blog that I called study hacks because the whole idea was continue the discussion that was started in those two student books. It was the missing chapters from those student books.

And then once I made the transition around 2010, away from just student advice, I maintained the name study hacks, but there was a tagline. There was a tagline. I'd gone through different taglines for the blog, back when that was the core of my digital world, a core that now, you know, the blog is more on my newsletter,

people like email newsletter better, and there's the podcast, etc. For a while, it was do less, do better, know why. It was how I was really summarizing the way I was thinking about student life. And in particular, not to go on too much of a tangent here, but in particular, after how to become a strategic, a student, I got heavily involved in dealing with issues of student overloaded and student stress.

And that's really where that motto first emerged. Do less, do better know why. It's how I thought you should go through high school and college in a way that opened up opportunities but was not overwhelming or stressful. It was the foundation for a life well-lived, not the foundation for getting a cardiac stint put in at an early age. And so that's where that came from. And then over time, that influenced almost everything else I wrote about. that influenced my career advice, my advice for the deep life more generally.

So that was my tagline for a while. It got replaced with decoding patterns of success or something, or maybe decoding patterns of success was before. I had a bunch of different taglines, and then eventually I just got rid of the taglines. But anyways, do less, do better know why has been with me for a long time. So that would be what should be on my poster.

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From Jessica. Jessica asks, How do you prevent following your to-do list and time blocks from feeling like you are just going through the motions? I think this deserves an elaboration. Let's look at Jessica's elaboration. She goes on to say, I enjoy a lot of the planning and visioning that is part of the processes you've described, but I find that when it comes to executing,

I don't feel very engaged in the things I'm doing, especially for work. I simply feel like I'm doing things that I have to do rather than I want to do, which makes me dread work and feel like I'm forcing myself to do it. The locus of control feels outside of myself. All right. Well, there's a couple ways at this, Jessica. Let me start with the cremudgeon way. The crumudgeonly response here is that's the definition of work.

Work is the application of force against something that's otherwise at rest, if we're going to use a real technical physical physics approach here. But if we want to apply that a little bit more abstractly to the world of work, is that this is what, in some sense, money is being exchanged in exchange. You are being giving money in exchange for your time and energy being dedicated to moving the proverbial thing that is otherwise at rest. It's hard. It's not always what you want to do. And so you would want to be careful or wary of this trap, what I would call the inspiration,

which is a trap of if I don't feel like doing this right now. Like I don't have a sense of inspiration for the actual activity I'm about to do, then it's a problem. That's a big trap. I wrote a lot about that in my book, so good they can't ignore you. It can paralyze you. It can rack you with indecision.

It can cause rapid and excessive career shifts as you try to seek an inspirational Nirvana that doesn't exist, a state in which the only things you're doing are things that you feel motivated to do in the moment. All right. So that's the crumagently response. There's a non-crimoginally response that's also relevant here because if you really are feeling demotivated by work beyond just the, oh, wait, work is hard reaction that we all

have. The way often to gain back that motivation is, first of all, career capital. Autonomy is the dream job elixir feeling like you have control over what you'll be. work on when you work on and how you do it is a huge boon to motivation and to gain autonomy you need career capital. So if the real issue here is that like you really don't have enough control. Like the work is really dreary and really prescriptive and and it's not just what work is hard you got to do it.

You just I really don't like this. You need more autonomy. Autonomy is valuable. Everyone wants autonomy. How do you get it? You have to have something to offer in return. So your response should be not woe is me. Your response should not be, well, maybe there's another job that they'll just give me more autonomy for free.

It should instead be, how do I get the career capital I need to change in for exchange for autonomy as quickly as possible? And that means building rare and valuable skills in an unambiguously demonstrable fashion as fast as possible. And that means deliberate practice. Here's what's important in my current job. This would get me to the next level. I'm going to stretch myself past from comfortable, systematically and repeatedly, because, so good I can't be ignored. Boom, next level, more autonomy. Skills translate to autonomy. Skills translate to autonomy. So that's one response I would give you. Two, another way to

gain back that efficacy that can help stave off this demotivation is lifestyle-centric career planning. Here's what I want my life to be like. What it's actually like, what the days are like, how much work I do or don't do, the character of that work, what's going on in my life outside to work, my fitness, my philosophical or theological life, literally the setting in which I live, you get this lifestyle fully featured

visioned, right, inside your imagination. And once you're really sold on that, you're really sold on this lifestyle, you say, okay, what are the different paths I have to get there? And there might be many, but let me see one that makes sense and begin executing down that path.

If you're doing work that in the moment feels kind of boring, and like you don't have much control over. but you know it's in service of a plan that's going to get you to A, which will get you to B, which will get you to C, which will get you to more or less this lifestyle that you're imagining. You don't mind doing that work. Just like when you are really sold on the vision of being in better shape, the physical discomfort and monotony of lifting a weight is very tolerable. Because that weight is part of a set you're doing, which is part of a routine you're doing, which is part of a larger exercise plan that's going to get you in better shape. So let's put together all those pieces.

The crumaginly response is avoid the inspiration trap. If your issue is, why don't I feel excited about everything I'm doing? The answer is because you're a human being. And that's just what work is. I don't care who you grab, the most inspired, artistic, creative novelist.

I'll tell you what, 95% of their time, they're cursing their copy of Scrivener and wishing they had gone into accounting. There is no job in which you're going to love what you're doing in every moment. That's not the game here. All right.

So two and three, let's say that's not the issue only partially issue. Two and three is two, you can get more autonomy and maybe get around that demotivation, but autonomy is very valuable. So what's your account balance you have to invest in that autonomy? And the currency in that account is skill. So focus on getting really good. And three, if you're doing lifestyle-centric career planning, you know exactly what you're doing today is serving for three years from now. It makes it more manageable. All right.

So we have a question here from Juliet. This may win the award for the longest question that's ever been submitted. It takes up one and a half pages, single space printed out here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of creative editing because there's a very good question in here. We just maybe will excise some of the details. So Juliet is asking about mornings. She says, I want to ask you for help with mornings. I find it easy to stick to my time blocks

and to have a productive and focused day once I start work. However, at least 50% of the time, I don't start work on time. Now, she goes on, this is where I'm going to excise or allied. Some of the details, there's reasons for this. Number one, insomnia, which I get because I have to some degree. And two, there's a fibromyalgia issue. The details here are complicated, but it has a real. impact on the morning as well.

So it's just very hard. She has a schedule that has a lot of things in the morning, meditation, yoga, running, that's supposed to have her working by 9.30. 50% of the time she doesn't get there. So then she goes on, if we skip past there, she goes on and says, I think you'll say, Juliet, at some point you've got to be a professional and professionals show up to work on time. This is, of course, irrefutable, and it's what I need to do. but I thought this would still be a useful question to ask

because I can't believe I'm the only homeworker out there who struggles with mornings. Am I though? No, Juliet, look, I'm often slow to start in the mornings. You know, I'm not great with mornings. I'm not a morning person. I usually am upset by how late I actually get going with work in the mornings,

exactly like you describe. And I don't really have the same really legitimate reasons you have. have to justify why I have a hard time getting ready in the morning. You know, so some things are fixed. We get up, I walk my older two boys to the bus stop. Like, you know, we got to get them ready, which, by the way, is an impossible task. It is crazy. Can I say as an aside, have you ever tried in a 20-minute period at 7 a.m. in the morning

to get an 8-year-old and a 6-year-old ready to go to school? You would think that I came downstairs and said, boys, I'm. I'm sorry, I need a working low wattage nuclear fission reaction put together by 720. You would think that's what I basically asked, that you need to go find some uranium and a high-capacity welding arc torch and build a nuclear fission reaction. Basically, I might as well be asking that. So what I've started doing, and Juliet, I'm sorry to go off on the side here, but this is just my life right now. What I've been doing then is we've been structuring my wife and I more and more every step of how they get ready. because if we leave them any room,

they literally freeze. They literally freeze. You'll come back. I could light the items on the table around them on fire. And if we left them alone without instructions, they would just sit there with the fire spreading around them. They just won't move, right? So everything.

Do this, then do that, then do this. On the other morning, I think I had everything down. I literally put a timer on the table while they're eating breakfast so they can see. You got to eat because when that timer is up, we got to move on. Like you can't just literally freeze for 20 minutes. And I had it all worked out down to the very last thing, which was like, okay, they've already, we make them pack their stuff ahead of time, put everything, your jackets, everything by the door before you sit down and eat breakfast. It's all there.

At a timer during breakfast. So you have to eat because the day before my six-year-old just sat there. And then after 20 minutes, hadn't eaten the thing. All right, everything's figured out. We're on time. Go put on your stuff. I go up, change, come down to take them out there. they had basically just frozen in the room next to their.

They went to their stuff and just sat there. It's so frustrated. Anyways, that's all a tangent, Julia, Juliet. So I do that. I take my boys to school. That's fine. That's not on me. That's hard.

And then I just can't, I can't get ready fast. I can't do it. My wife makes fun of me. I don't know how normal people do this. Normal people, my wife will be downstairs, we'll be talking. It's like, oh, I got to get ready to take the kids to school. like, you know, grab a shower, et cetera. Four minutes later, she's downstairs,

showered fully dressed, taking the kids out the door. This takes me 35 minutes. And I don't know why it takes me. So I just eats up my time. Somehow getting ready just eats up all of my time. And I'm ranting a little bit about this because I'm so frustrated with myself that you would think taking a shower, shaving, putting on clothes should take about 15 minutes. It takes me 35 minutes.

I've even tried. I've literally tried to break it down step by step. Like how can I squeeze time out of it? I've put on timers. It just takes me forever. It takes me five times the time it takes my wife. I'm not doing anything special. I just, I don't know.

Maybe I get stuck thinking in the shower. That's probably true. I don't know what's going on. But more often than not, it'll be nine or nine-thirty. And I really haven't done anything yet. And I have to leave by 10, a little after 10, to get the campus to teach. And so there's not enough time to get anything done. And morning after morning, I'm thinking, look, I've been up since 6.

And here I am driving to work at 10. I haven't done anything. all of this leads to Juliet you're not a morning person, it's fine. Have a later, put a big buffer into your morning and have a later start. You know? And if you get started early, then you can end early.

It's not a big deal. But just start your day at 10.30 or something. I mean, I basically do that a lot of days anyway. So anyways, I thought in honor of the longest question they've been submitted, I would give an unnecessarily long answer.

But there we go. My mornings are an entire source of frustration for me, Juliet. So welcome to the club. We had jackets made. We'll send you one. All right. And with that, let's move on now to some questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Usman, who asks any advice for people who are studying while working in a warehouse for 40 hours a week. A little bit of an elaboration here. I work in a warehouse job four days a week and 10 hours a day with two 30 minute breaks. I am currently studying an online course

about computer science. When I finish work, I am physically exhausted and my feet ache. I have most of your books, including How to Comestrade a student. It's very helpful. Do you have any more advice

for people who are working full-time and want to study? Well, that's a good question. You know, a group I hear a very similar question from a lot is actually practicing doctors. They have similar types of shifts where it's not every day, but the shifts are longer.

They also often have some sort of concentration bearing, non-urgent, but important activities studying for new certification or they're working on a writing project. So doctor or research, they're doing a research project on the side. So I've heard the same question from them a lot as well. Usually what I would say there, which I think holds here as well, if you're doing a 10-hour shift in a day, regardless of whether this is you're on your feet seeing patients or working in a warehouse, it's going to be hard to do meaningful high concentration studying on a regular basis after such days.

You should recognize that this is really demanding what you're doing and not be down on yourself that you then find it hard after that 10 hours to get after it with an online computer science course. So I'm going to tell you that's the same thing I tell doctors. When they do these long shifts, they often do 10-hour shifts or 12-hour shifts. you're not going to really get good progress done on your research project if you've done a 12-hour shift at the hospital. So you might have to slow down the pace at which you're working on things so that when you work on it, you can work on it well. You should also pump up the intensity when you do work on it.

Remember the core formula and how to become a straight-day student is work accomplished as time spent times intensity of focus. So if you're working four days, you might want to take two out of the three days that remain, those are two days on which you're going to have a non-trivial amount of studying, and that studying is going to be laser-beam locked in high-intensity focus. And you have two medium-length sessions per week with incredible focus, according to that equation, can accomplish as much work as slightly smaller, but also much less focused sessions at the end of multiple 10-hour work days.

So work less. do the work you do with extreme intensity of focus and therefore do that work on the days where you actually have those resources to invest. Now, I will note, you noticed that you noted that you had read how to become a straight-A student. An interesting tidbit about that book. So I wrote that book and I mentioned on the show

a couple weeks ago that I hadn't looked at sales numbers for that for a really long time. I looked up the royalties last month and were surprised to see that thing has sold 300,000 copies. Which is a lot for a non-fiction book. and it has done that without ever having major publicity, without ever being on a bestseller list, without ever really being mentioned by anyone well known.

It's all just chugging in the background, word of mouth, over 15 years. What I discovered about that book is that its number one audience is not full-time undergraduates at expensive four-year universities. In fact, those are the students, the students that my entire adult life

I have been surrounded at, at MIT, at Dartmouth, at Georgetown, Those type of students often don't want anything to do with that. They have their college experiences wrapped up with their presentation of self. They have this idea of college years being a time of expression and as you grow into adulthood. And there's an academic component but a social component and a loss of inhibition component. And they don't want to have anything to do with Cal Newport, seven steps for managing your time. The number one audience for that book was non-traditional college students. So a lot of people returning to college later in life.

I used to do a lot of work with vets on the GI Bill. So you're coming back to college after military stint. You're coming back on the GI Bill. I used to do some work with the Warrior Scholar Project. First generation students as well. I've worked with multiple different first-generation student, usually scholarship funds, where they're helping students

that are their first in their generation or in their family to go to college. So a lot of community college I've worked with as well because all of these non-traditional students are much more likely to say here's a challenge I want to do well here.

What's some advice? Great, here's some advice. Let's go. You know, it's like I'm working in a warehouse trying to get this job, trying to get this course done. I don't have an animal house fantasy where if I'm not wearing a toga,

at least two days a week, I'm somehow not properly enjoying my 20s. Like, I need to get this course done. Give me advice. And so that's been the number one audience for that book is actually, it's not for your student. So anyways, hearing your question made me think about it. I'm not surprised you're looking at the book. I'm not surprised you're getting value out of it.

But that is my advice. Don't work on your warehouse days. Work on your higher energy days. But then turn that intensity focus knob all the way up. And you'll be surprised by how little time you actually need to get this done. All right. we got a question here from Ian who asked about meditative walks. As I am walking around, I want to try and solve specific problems.

I'm curious to know, do you set a specific question for a specific walk? Do you let your mind wander? Or do you return to the same question as distractions arise? What does thinking look and sound like? Well, this is productive meditation. It's an idea that I included in deep work. and I often talk about when I give keynote addresses about deep work. It's my term for exactly what you're talking about.

Working on a professional problem in a preambulatory state. I'm going to use some unnecessary words. Let me use another unnecessary word. This is a peripatetic productivity maxim that I call productive meditation. So I give rules in that based off of just hard one experience. And the rules for productive meditation are one problem. Okay? So you come back to it.

When your mind wanders, come back to the original problem. When your mind wanders again, notice, don't judge, but come back to the original problem. That's where the meditation piece of productive meditation that phrase comes from when I was doing a lot of this. So I really got into productive meditation during my postdoc years. During those same years, for whatever reason, I went on a big John Cabot Zen kick as reading full catastrophe living and the various other books that Zinn had written. He's really known for basically bringing a secularized mindfulness meditation practice into the formal medical world. That's what John is known for. And so I had a lot of John Cabot Zen going in my head when I was thinking about productive.

of meditation. And what I borrowed then from him and mindfulness meditation more generally was the non-judgmental notice noticing of your attention wandering, but bringing it back consistently. That's usually what I do. Now, what happens is you're going to notice a lot and bring it back a lot, notice a lot, bring it back a lot. There is actually a function, a training function in that. And meditation people hate this type of terminology.

So they don't like me calling what I'm talking about now something with the name meditation. but it's true. It helps your mind practice sustaining focus because it doesn't get the reward. It wanders over to an email that you have to write and you pull it back. It wanders over to a conversation you had that you're worried about and then you pull it back. It doesn't get the shiny treat at the end of that distraction path. And so the urge to do so reduces and you get better at sustaining your focus.

The other thing you get better at when you do productive meditation is facility with your working memory. You can hold things in your working memory, pull one of those items out, do some work on it, put it back in, take out another element. That is what you have to do in order to keep making progress when you're just on foot and you get better at it with practice. So productive meditation is pretty hard at first. I usually describe it as cognitive pull-ups because pull-ups are an example of an exercise that's hard, especially if you haven't been doing them. It's just really hard. You're heavy and you're trying to lift your whole weight up. but if you do them on a regular basis,

it does work a lot of muscles. It's very effective. That is what productive meditation is like. It's very hard at first, but if you do it consistently, you get a pretty big leap pretty quickly in your ability to keep your mind's eye focused more or less on one thing

and actually do pretty good progress on that one thing. I will now do a fair amount of writing in my head. I can make a fair amount of progress on math proofs in my head. If it's a long walk, I'll bring a notebook with me to record things at a couple milestones along the way. Like if I'm in the woods, I'll sit by a creek and do it.

it. If it's in my neighborhood, I'll just wait until I get home to take notes on what I was thinking about. So read the productive meditation chapter in deep work, Ian. I think you'll like when you come across. All right, let's move on now to a question from Mark. Mark says, do you have any suggestions for how working parents can schedule their time to maximize time spent with children given eight-hour workdays, fitness, and household tasks? Well, it's, it's, it It's hard because especially household tasks take up a lot of time. Fitness, you can fit that. You might be able to fit that somewhere else.

But household tasks take a lot of time. Everyone's tired. If it's an eight-hour day, your kids are probably in some sort of aftercare that they're coming home from. They're tired. You're tired. You've just been working. You've just been commuting. So set your expectations lower for the actual work days.

I think that is reasonable advice. to maximize the weakens more. So I'm a proponent of be very wary about the instinct to say this would be enriching. So let's do that activity. And you know, that would be good too. Let's do that activity. And actually, you know, I think it'd be really good for them to spend time with so-and-so. It's the allure of child scheduled construction on paper.

You produce this thing that has all these attributes you like. There's a real allure to that. But when you implement these crowded schedules in the child, child's real life, it's mainly basically people yelling in a Honda Odyssey. It's all this overhead, all this stress, everyone is exhausted. And so your schedule on paper, this is just my personal opinion, should probably be way more sparse than in the moment when you're creating this schedule for your kids. You're thinking like, well, they should probably do that and probably do this.

They don't know. They want to be with you and not be really tired. So that frees more time on the weekend so you can really spend more time together. And then you choose your moments, I suppose, in the weeknights. We do dinner together. There's build something around the bedtime routine. You know, I'm a big believer in having one outing per kid per week. All right.

We are going to go, I'm going to pick you up from school, just you. And we're going to go throw the baseball around and get dinner. Okay, me and you are going to go to the bookstore on this night and get a book. And so, you know, some days are busy. You don't have time for this. But if a kid is getting, and again, I have no back. I'm not the expert on this. My only expertise is like everyone else who's a parent, I have a bunch of kids and this is just me pulling stuff, you know, out of a hat here. So keep that in mind. But if a kid feels like they've had one serious one-on-one thing with you per week and there's time spent with them every day and they're not completely exhausted being dragged around on the weekend, I think that's probably pretty good. I think that's probably pretty good. I think you're about you're doing everything you need to do and I want to be too guilty behind it. Fitness, I said in the

beginning you can probably hack that. I mean, fitness really is a thing that, you know, if you've got young kids and they're in school, I don't know. I don't think you can, it's optimal to lose like an hour of that evening time exercising. So I think you should steal that from work. To the extent possible, just find a way to steal that time from work. Just go during the lunch hour, bike to work and exercise at the gym nearby before you go to work. Do it in the morning before you go. I often am exercising after I put the kids to bed. So I don't have a lot of, lot of time then, so I do very intense high intensity exercising just so I can get it done. That's something where I think you can steal time from work. That's my other hack. Maybe not all my hacks should really reduce to steal stuff from work. That's my other hack is steal time from work for household admin to. Be efficient about it, but there's 30 minutes well deployed in the middle of a workday can get a lot done that needs to be done for the household.

So, you know, hopefully no administrators are working. I used to use the first 30 minutes. I mean, there's no real workday for being a professor. But I would spend what most people would consider to be the first 30 minutes of the workday after nine, always doing household admin. And I found if you could do 30 minutes of household admin every morning before you start your day, the amount that awaits you at the end of the week or in the evening is actually much less. So this idea that when you're at work as a knowledge worker that it's like you're clocking in out of factory.

And every minute you should be cranking widgets. That's crazy. There's ups, there's downs, high intensity recovery. So steal some time for exercise from work, steal some time

for household admin, and then mess around with the type of strategies I talked about before. And I think that's, you'll be doing fine. He'll be doing fine. All right,

we have a question here from Mr. academia. He asks, as a computer scientist, are you so good you can't be ignored? And if not,

does it bother you? Well, it's a hard question. It does bother me, but it's a hard question because in any field with an elite competitive structure, the question of what is good

is a squirrely one. Because there is almost always levels above whatever you grab, whatever you fix as this is good. It's all super relative. It really depends who you fix to. So I don't know the answer to this question. It depends

who you anchor to. So let me give you both arguments. Let me give you the argument that, no, I'm not. The argument, no, I'm not is, well, look, you're not at a top 10, you're not at a top 10 computer science department. There is no major theorem that has been solved that has your name on it. That's true. In recent years during the pandemic, your publication dried up. You wouldn't see that with like a really top computer scientist. You had other things going on and, you know, that kind of dried up.

There's certain very competitive grants that I don't have. I don't have an NSF career grant, right? So I could make an argument pretty quickly that I'm a bust. All right. Now, let me go the other way. Let me go the other way. You were, look, you came out of Dartmouth sort of guns blazing, A's and everything, went to MIT, like the number one place.

in the world, breeze through your doctorate there, got A's in all of your classes, were publishing left and right at MIT, got a really good tenure track academic job at a top 25 U.S. University in sort of

exactly the narrow geographic band in which you wanted to live. Once at that university, you published a lot, you got tenure early, you went up for tenure after just four years, you were named the provost distinguished associate professor scholar. You have 70,000. peer-reviewed papers and over 3,000 citations on those papers,

an H-index of 30. Compared to most people who study computer science, oh, you're a tenured professor who has all these publications. Both of those things could be true. Those are both accurate assessments I gave. So, you know, honestly, it really depends on the day whether I feel really good or really bad. Like, if I'm hanging out with some of my old MIT buds that are just killing it, you know,

I feel essentially like I'm a lot. a fourth grader who wandered into the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, right? But then other times I'm around my students or this or that and I'm like, oh yeah, look all these ideas I came up with. These theorems that I cracked, these new techniques, these NSF grants have gotten. And I feel really good. So it's really hard. It's really hard in fields with elite competitive structures.

And so it just goes back and forth. Same thing with writing. I mean, I could do the same thing with writing. That depends on the day. I have friends who have sold book amounts that boggle the mind. Like more than, well, not more than, say eight figures, eight figures worth of books, right? Lots of books. Made a fortune, you know.

And I have friends who are award winning, you know, notable book, major awards, including at least one Pulitzer winner. So I can look there and be like, what the hell am I doing as a writer? I'm nothing. I'm nobody. Or I can look the other way and be like, hey, I have seven books and write for the New Yorker and a bunch of New York Times bestsellers and I make a lot of best of the year list. I think email is on the time, we'll be on the Times of London's best of the year list. It's on the financial times, especially year list. It's on Amazon's best of year list.

Like, hey, I'm writing books that sell a ton of copies, relatively speaking, and are on best of year books. Or then I look over here and say they don't have a poll at sir and it didn't sell 10 million copies, so it's nothing. So I guess my point here, Mr. Academia, is that it all just depends what you're measuring against. So probably the right strategy is to stop trying to actually get a definitive answer and shift over like I try to do on my good days towards lifestyle-centric value-driven career planning. This is what I want my life to be like. These are the things I value. I value the craft of writing. I value the craft of the computer science I do.

Here's what I want my life to be like. try to get as much satisfaction as I can out of the execution of this plan, of the realization of this idealized lifestyle, and try less to put myself up on a scoreboard and say, I just fell from seven to nine, now I'm upset. I don't succeed in that mindset shift all the time, but it's what I try to do.

All right, I think we have time for one more question. Let's do one from Linda. Linda asks, do you have any general advice for a master student in the sciences choosing a thesis topic? Is the topic more or less or as important as location, people in the lab, nature of work, topic relevance? Does it really matter in the long run what the topic is? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm looking at the elaboration here because the fact you said master's degree and not PhD gives a very different answer.

If we were talking about a dissertation, especially if you wanted to do an academic job, there's a lot of things that really matter there. So if you wanted an academic job and this was a PhD dissertation, I would say you want to choose an advisor who lots of universities wish they could hire. But they can't because that advisor is already at this really good school and is very happy. And what you wanted to then do is basically become the low-cost alternative for that advisor by, by mastering whatever she does or whatever he does, that approach, that you are their protege, that if they can't hire her,

well, at least they can hire you because you're younger and on the market. That's the best way to open up your options in a PhD environment. Master's degree is a little bit different. In your elaboration, you say that you don't want to go into doctoral graduate school after this.

You want to go into industry. So then I would say topic really matters from a, what skill is valuable in the industry right now. master's degrees are short a couple years so you don't have to worry like with a PhD what's going to be popular six years from now you can just say what do I what type of job do I want I want a job in one of these type of organizations what is the thing they're looking for right now let me find a way to do a master's degree that would force me to learn that skill and show them good at it very simple it's a skill that's going to be on your resume that an employer in the next year or two is going to look at think ahead what skill you want them to see so I would see that almost entirely as an excellent exercise and skill, useful skill acquisition. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode.

Thank you to everyone who sent in their questions. I'm about to solicit new questions from my mailing list. So make sure that you have signed up for my mailing list at calnewport.com because my question survey will be sent out shortly. Be back Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.