Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 154: LISTENER CALLS: Coping With a Hyperactive Job

Episode Date: December 9, 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.LISTENER CALLS:- Doctors and depth. [6:42]- Career capital in the military. [10:39]- Coping with a hyperactive job. [14:45]- Making a teaching plan for the semester. [27:32]- Managing references. [33:53] 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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That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. episode 154. I'm here in the Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I heard some news I want to get your take on. Fire away.

So it turns out there's a viral phenomenon right now, from what I understand on TikTok and maybe also Instagram, focused on time blocking. So that is a big thing on the social networks right now. I don't think it's connected to me at all, right? I mean, I don't think it's people talking about my time blocking type thinking. I mean, so time blocking, obviously, I talk about a lot.

It's in deep work. I sell a time block planner. But I don't think the kids these days know as much about me. So for some reason, time blocking has somewhat independently or maybe implicitly nudged by me emerged as a viral phenomenon. So here's my question. Do you think it's going to be off-brand? if we start doing some TikTok videos about time blocking. Fire away.

I think that's going to be. That might be the answer. Yeah, I think this is, you got to adjust with the time. Look, I have something in mind that's very tasteful. I think very professional.

And so it would make it clear that we, we still have a distance from it. What I'm thinking is it's just me, camera, you know, a normal background, stately background, talking here is time blocking maybe hold the planner

just meet a camera replace my face with a cat's face but you know just me looking at the camera face as a cat face talking about time blocking stately background auto tune my voice so it's kind of musical but again just me looking to camera

I think I need you in the background aggressively dancing is what I'm thinking I think most TikTok videos have aggressive dancing but again I'm professional we're doing this professional it's good light It's media camera, good content, high quality content. I don't know.

I think if we do a TikTok video like that, people will still think my stance against social media will still be preserved. I think we'd still be okay, right? Yeah, I think it'll be fine. Get those 21-year-old crowd. Yeah. So I don't know. Anyways, so we're viral and not we, time blocking is viral. Hey, for the better.

For the better. I mean, I don't care where people come across it and I don't care if my name is associated or not. It makes a big difference. when you actually have some intention in your planning, your day goes much better. But honestly, that last sentence I just said, and the tone in which I said it is like 100% why I shouldn't be on one of these social media services because it's so bland and professorial. So, okay. How did you find out about the trend with time blocking? A TV producer told me.

So there you go. I guess they keep a closer tabs on these type of thing. The other thing I found out about, okay, this is kind of weird. And I don't know much about, I can't understand this. I need to do more research on this. But there was a personality. I think it might have been on TikTok, whose name was Professor Cal.

Right. And someone pointed this out to me because there was like some articles like who is Professor Cal and that it was a lot of information about me. Because I'm a professor. My name is Cal. I don't really understand who Professor Cal is, but I think it has something to do with erotic ASMR videos. you know, like those ASMR things where like you do these sounds real close to the microphone and like something like this.

And it was going and then he disappeared or something. I don't know much about it. So it's kind of like a mystery where he is. But he has my name. So I don't know. I mean, I should just say this clearly. I am not Professor Cal. I don't really know what Professor Cal is.

On TikTok. Yeah. Though maybe this is the plan. I come out and I claim the mantle of Professor Cal. Professor Cal, we push a lot of time block planners. I mean, again, we're going to have to do this now probably in the middle of erotic ASMR videos. We're going to sell some planners.

It is a holiday season. I think we've got a plan. New Year's resolutions. That's it. You have to get a new phone, though, for TikTok, because I might throw off your whole organization with phones and social media. Okay, so I've got a new phone just for TikTok. That's right, for doing my, yes.

Erotic ASMR about productivity, cat face, Jesse dancing. I think we've got ourselves a plan. We are about the blow up. brand is going to be huge. All right. No, enough of this. Let's do some listener calls. Hey, Cal.

I'm a resident physician in internal medicine at a large research institution. I'm struggling to make deep work part of my routine. For me, deep work consists of doing clinical research, staying up to date on the literature, and studying for board exams. The structure of my days changes every two to four weeks, with some blocks of intensive 10 to 12-hour shifts, other blocks of the most. more typical 9 to 5 schedule and very occasional quote-unquote research blocks of unstructured time. My one day off a week varies from one week to the next. When I'm at work, I do have

unpredictable periods of relative quiet, but my door is open, my pager is on, and there's always the possibility it's truly an emergency. In order to become so good, they can't ignore me. I aspire to become a productive researcher in addition to a skilled clinician. How should I approach this? Well, it's a good question. I get asked these type of questions a lot. There's a lot of concern slash interest right now among physicians when it comes to issues of concentration and distraction. You would be surprised, for example, how often I'm invited to speak at grand rounds. I get a bunch of these invitations because doctors care a lot about this.

So I want to start with that. You're not alone in having this question. The second thing I want to do here is a reality check. your clinical schedule set up right now as described is very demanding. That is a lot of work you were doing, and it is difficult, cognitively demanding work. The reality is the reality. I don't know that it's possible for you to prepare for boards and do a significant amount of original research at the same time that you have such a difficult schedule. Because it sounds like you're doing shifts, right, these 12-hour shifts, and then you have,

nine to five clinical hours sort of outside of those shifts and you're only having one day off. That's actually quite a heavy load. So I don't know this is good news or bad news, but I'm basically giving you permission to slow down here a little bit. If boards are the next thing that's coming up, that's what you should be focusing on. And then after boards, if you want to figure out how to do research, again, you can work with these existing research blocks and be highly effective in the time. That might work for you. but you might have to find a way to reconfigure your situation. I mean, you have to keep in mind that the really killer MD research types that have the great academic positions at the big schools, I mean, they work a lot, but they probably aren't working the same schedule that you're talking about here.

I mean, they have research labs. They have more significant time when they're just working on that research. You're already starting from a high point of view. So this is what I want to say to you here is let's reality check, have a little bit more self-compassion here. You can't do all those things at the same time. Work on your clinical skills, pass your boards, figure out, okay, what's the next research thing I want to do? Do I have time for it? If not, are there changes I can make that would free up more time for it?

And if the answer is no, the type of clinical position I have makes it very hard to do research, then maybe you say, let me just focus on killing it. That's probably the absolute worst adjective to use there, but killing it in my clinical work and doing that really well. Or shifting to an academic position in which a lot more time. time is given for the non-clinical work, but it's all about reality checks here. It's easy to fall into a trap where you say it would be great if I could do X and Y and Z. But oftentimes it's impossible to do X and Y and Z at the same time. Take it from someone who falls into that trap all the time and constantly has to step back out again, constantly has to resimplify things again.

There's only so much time you have. And I think it's okay. I think it's okay to recognize that. All right, moving on to our next call, let's shift from the world of medicine to the world of the military. Hi, Kyle. My name is John,

and I'm a serving military member that will be released medically over next year. My question to you is regarding career capital, and specifically, do you have any advice or tools that I could use to evaluate my career capital so I can transfer as much as I can when I transition to my civilian life. Thank you very much. I get this question somewhat frequently from people who are nearing the end of their military career and thinking about the transition. I usually have two points to make.

The first point is what you're talking about here is the right thing to be talking about. That is thinking about assessing the career capital you have already. built up in your current military position and being pretty accurate about that so you can target what jobs you go for. I think that makes a lot of sense. You want to avoid if possible starting over from a career capital position after you leave the military saying let me just go start with a completely unrelated job because you probably have built up some valuable skills.

The right way to get that information is just look at who has gone before you, people, with similar positions within the military who left and the line. last four or five years, where did they go? You've got to go out there and gather this intelligence from other people coming out of your same specialty from your same rank, et cetera. So for example, let's say you're in the Navy, let's say you're a nuke and you're about to leave and you might say, okay, where do nukes go after the Navy? And you see like there's a couple options here that are pretty common. There's some government options. There's the NRC, maybe the NSAA, some places that makes sense. Then there's some industry options that might make sense. Okay, you go work for the

nuclear industry, et cetera. And maybe there's some consulting or sales options where they like that particular skill set. And then you have that information. Now you know, these are, these are positions that value what I do. So gather that intelligence. The second point I make is it's often frustratingly difficult while you're still in the military to try to acquire new career capital in a self-directed manner. So I get questions about this a lot from people who are frustrated. They're in their last year or two of service. And they're like, oh, I want to build up skills now.

That's going to be very valuable when I leave. And they're stymied by the bureaucracy. They're stymied by the lack of flexibility. They're stymied by the fact that they are trying to build up cutting edge computer IT skills to get this job right out of the military, but they're still using, you you know, Commodore 64s for this particular Admiral scheduling system and you have to put punch cards into the thing and it's so out of date and it's not relevant. That's just a reality often of very large bureaucracy.

So that's my other piece of advice I give is do what you do in the military very well. Whatever program you're in, do that program very well, serve with distinction, and build up whatever skills are available. Match that to the extent possible by asking what other people have already done, who have left in similar situations, but other than that, you have to maybe relax on thinking what's going to come next. Once you leave the military and you have that next position, now you're going to have all that autonomy that you didn't have before.

Now you're going to have that flexibility that you didn't have before to start asking the questions of, okay, what now do I want to learn? What's the path I want to navigate here? What's the skill I could start learning now? So you sort of relax these last couple of years, do your job well, feel out the market. but once you're out of the military and have that job, now it's time to put the career capital foot back down on that accelerator. Now it's time to start asking,

what should I do now that I can do almost anything? All right, moving on, we now have a call about someone wanting to help their girlfriend with ad hoc messaging. Hi, Cal. My name is Vinny, and I'm a freelance software developer, but this question isn't about me. I'm trying to help my girlfriend, a high-level friend. photo producer avoid ad hoc unstructured back-and-forth messages, but constantly putting out fires and acquiescing to last-minute ultra-short deadlines that necessitate promptly responding

to collaborators' questions and feedback seems to be the entirety of her role and the value that she brings to her client's projects. I suppose more generally, my question is when an entire industry and your competition within it seem to be fully content with losing your sanity to the hyperactive hive mind, and this precise trait gives them a competitive edge. How can we compete? It often feels like it's better to give in for a few years and enjoy the high salaries, retire early, and then get into a deep life. But years have a way of turning into decades and decades into death. All right. Thanks. Well, we have a lot to cover here.

I mean, first of all, there's the inherent danger of the situation. So you're looking for advice now to give to your girlfriend. And, you know, I can tell you there's nothing that girlfriends like more than having their boyfriends. explain to them how they should live their life and how their work should actually be executed. So we're already in trouble here. So good luck. But let's look at this more abstractly. Let's look at this more abstractly. Jobs that seem to be inherently hyperactive, what should you do? And it looks like what you're asking is, can it be improved? And if not, should it be suffered through temporarily and then maybe build up a lot of of money retire early or should you switch?

I think these are good questions. All the answers are on the table. Let's start with this particular job that your girlfriend has and push on the issue of whether it can be made less hyperactive. And if we decide in the end, it can't, then we'll look at these other two options. All right, there are a lot of positions that seem fundamentally hyperactive that you can actually do a lot of work to pull that back. So when you're in a situation where it seems like hyperactive communication is necessary,

often what that means is given the existing agreements and structures for interaction that are in place, there's no way to do this work without just being on demand and being able to answer things all the time. That's often what that means. Because often the exercise someone will do is they will say, well, what would happen if I just stop tomorrow checking my email all the time? What if I didn't look at my phone all the time? And they say, oh, it would be a disaster because this is when things come in and they're urgent and things would get missed.

And that's true. But the question is not what would happen if I stopped tomorrow checking email or checking my phone. The question is, is there work I could do right now that would make it possible a month from now not to be checking my email or phone so much? That is, if we change the fundamental agreement and structures for how interaction actually happened. There's probably a lot more leeway here than you might expect. The big principle I always come back to is that when it comes to external communication, clarity trumps accessibility. Almost always true.

Why do people want an immediate response for something? Because in the lack of other clarity about how interaction on this subject occurs, there's no clarity on that. When I send a message to you, I am stressed out right away. This is important. I need it dealt with. There's nothing I can count on here about. Here's how these sort of situations always get dealt with.

And so until you answer me, I have to keep this on my mind and it's a source of stress. In that environment, yes, I'm going to want you to answer right away. Because every minute you don't answer is a minute that I have to keep track of this thing and be stressed about whether it's going to be answered or not. Almost always when you see these cases of people saying emailing two minutes after the first email, did you get the first email, what's going on? it's not because they have some sort of dictatorial obsession about communication. It's because every minute that you don't answer is one that they're stressed out and trying to keep track of this. So if you can have more clarity, this is how we deal with X, this is how we deal with Y, this is how we deal with Z. Clarity that takes that stress away from the client.

Okay, I know how this is going to handle. I can get off my mind. They're often going to be okay with that. Even if the way it's handled is not, I will just get back to you within one minute. Now, I can't give you these specific solutions for your girlfriend's situation because I don't know that industry well. But I can talk about the type of things I've seen in other classically hyperactive community type of segmentary economy where we've seen escape from hyperactivity. So having something like here are the set times we talk every week. We can get through everything that's going on and I'll give you a written copy of everything we discussed and all the commitments.

and so we can get that right back to you, that often makes a big difference. Office hours make a big difference. There's a set time that you can get me every afternoon or every morning and I will be there. You'll just get me and you can look me in the eye over Zoom or get me on the phone and we handle what has to happen. That works pretty well. Having an assistant of some type that intakes all of the intaking crisis communication and you have a morning and afternoon sit down with that assistant. And the client knows this. The client is like, oh my God, there's this issue here.

The system's like, I've got it, I've logged it, and, you know, Susan will be looking at this afternoon. One way or the other, you will hear back from us at the end of that afternoon or at the end of the morning session if it comes in overnight. Clarity. I've sent this thing. I got a response. I know when I'm going to hear a more detailed response. I trust it. I can get it off my head. I'm not going to be so stressed out about it. Depending on the type of work, more involved client extranets can work as well. You have a whole system. Here's the status of the project. Here's where the next meeting is. Here's all the documents. Here's the blog about what we're working on.

The work logs. You can see what's going on. Here is where you register your questions and concerns, and we can see them right here, and the answers come in here, and you get those answers once a day. That makes a big difference. Having different tools for information to be injected into the project beyond just let me put it in an email and hope it gets tracked,

some sort of collaborative project management software, that can make a big difference. All these things can make a big difference. Now let's say you've done. all of that, but there's these two clients to say, I don't care. I just want you to answer my email because that's my thing. Well, then you have the option of firing those clients. Because this is also something that comes up often in these situations, that the, the

malformed social instinct that says you have to answer me is not evenly distributed. And the people who have that instinct, you don't care about clarity, they like the power, don't work with them. Right? Yeah, I'd less money. but you're going to do much better with the other clients are going to be happier.

So I think all those things are on the table. Clarity over accessibility, clarity over accessibility, firing the small number of people who won't put up with that. That might get you there. If that doesn't get you there,

if it's fundamental for this work, now it's just the way her firm runs, they're not going to change. That's just what it is. I would counsel against the, I will retire soon or early. Let me put up with it to make the high salary.

Not worth it. Not worth it. Take your career capital, go somewhere else where you can set up a day-to-day professional life that is sustainable. I would do that tomorrow. I would do that tomorrow. You're not going to build up enough money to retire in three years. That's hard to do. You're going to spend more of it than you think.

And you're going to land the autonomy trap. You're going to land in the classic autonomy trap of you're going to get higher and higher salary, get better and better. It's very difficult to leave. I'm usually very much against almost any professional circumstance. where it is unsustainable and pulling down on your mental health. Almost always that is not the right place to be unless it really is time limited and serving a broader goal. If you are a Navy seal in buds during hell week, yeah, that's psychologically bad. But it's serving a larger goal.

And it will be over after a few days and then you'll have the pool torture and some other stuff going on. but then it will be done. Okay, I get that. But if it's just this is how we do business, get out sooner rather than later. You know, life is too short, but also life is too cool. There's too much potential for interestingness and depth

and everything else that could be going on in your life. With all of that potential out there, do you really want to have the dominant thing in your life being a day-to-day experience that is stressful and dragging? So if you cannot engineer the hyperactivity out of the position, change that position. And again, I'm sure your girlfriend's going to appreciate you figuring this all out for her and telling her what she should do for her job.

And so let me just, I'll speak directly to your girlfriend. My apologies in advance for the mansplaining this coming your way. But it's a good question in the abstract, and I think that's the way I think about it. This podcast is sponsored by Foresigmatic, a wellness company that is well known for its delicious mushroom coffee. For Cigmatics mushroom coffee is a real organic fair trade single origin arabica coffee with lion's main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. I like to drink this mushroom coffee right before each of my deep work sessions. The mushrooms give it a unique physiological footprint.

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That's let's disco.com slash deep for 30% off your first order. Thank you, Disco. Our next question comes from a professor. about scheduling teaching. Hi, Calgaryen here, a follow-up question to your semester plans, a fellow academic year as well. How do you factor in teaching in your semester plans? So I get the research component, but how do you factor in teaching in your semester strategic plans, that is, you know, prep and everything else?

And then how do you factor in your personal semester goals or strategic goals, however you may want to call them in the semester plans? So looking forward to hearing from you. And thank you so much for all you do. As I said, following you for the last many, many years. So appreciate it. Looking forward to hearing your take on incorporating all the wheels of academia into the strategic funds.

Thank you. Well, when it comes to my plan for the upcoming semester, I start with teaching. That's my starting point because obviously the teaching is something that has to happen and it has to happen at a consistently high level. Now, the good news about teaching is that after you've taught a class a few times, the work that's required becomes quite predictable. So you know what you're in for. It doesn't have the same uncertainty that research does,

where you don't know, is this going to work or not? Are you going to come across a topic that's interesting? Is it going to take a ton of time? Or you're going to have a quick breakthrough? That can be really hard to predict and plan. Teaching you know. I taught this class twice before. I know what's involved.

So my approach typically is to automate everything. Now, I'm using the word automate here in an idiosyncratic way that's unique to my, the way I talk about work and productivity. I don't mean automate in the traditional way of, some other system will do this for you, like automatically. When I use the term automate, I'm actually using a version of this term I introduced in my book, A World Without Email. What I mean by that is you automate the thinking and scheduling process around the work.

You don't have to make a decision each week or each day about what am I going to do next. You figure out when the work happens, how it happens, and where it's going to happen. So the stuff you know predictably goes into supporting this class, you figure out a system for that. This is when and where it happens every single week. The scheduling itself has become automated. That's then the foundation of my schedule for the semester. So now I know when this works going to happen. It's on my calendar for the entire semester.

Now I work around everything else. So that becomes the can't be compromised on anchor of my schedule. And I know exactly where and when that work happens. And then I figure out what am I going to do with what's left. So, for example, I'm working right now on figuring out my semester plan for the upcoming spring semester at Georgetown. I'm teaching two courses. And the way those courses are arranged to which I feel good about and doesn't always work out this way. But I think it's going to work quite well is they're on the same days, Monday and Wednesday.

And so I have one course that's at 11 and another course is at 3.30. And that's the same on Monday and on Wednesday. So now I'm starting to work through. Okay, how is this going to work? Prep is going to happen in the morning before I leave for campus. I have that pretty much dialed in. I'm teaching a course right now at 11. So it's a good amount of time to do prep.

One of the courses I'm teaching right now in the fall and it's been heavily prepped very well. And I put a lot of effort this fall into updating all my notes so that when I get to the spring, I don't really have to do new prep for that course. The prep time in the morning can go towards the second course. I'm going to use the time in between those two courses. I'm going to get lunch and then I'm going to use all the time. That will put me at 1 o'clock to 3.30, 2 and a half hours. That is going to be me in the office, right?

Me and the office academic time. So I'll probably open up that whole time to be office hours in my plans. So I have two classes full of students. There's a lot of access they need. So I'm just going to basically say, hey, one to 320. come by my office on Monday or Wednesdays. I'm always going to be there. That's when I'm going to be working on things.

This is where I'm going to, that window is where I'm going to schedule any of the other work related to these courses. So I've already figured out TA situations, who my TAs are going to be, the process with which those TAs are going to work. They're going to come to my, I'm figuring this all out. They're going to come to my office when we have a new problem set due for us to talk it over. That time comes out of that window. When it comes time to going through and checking grading, that's going to show up. on my calendar during that window between the two courses. I mean, I'm really working out the whole thing.

So that basically for me, for this particular semester, Monday and Wednesdays is all teaching and everything fits into there. Everything related to teaching fits into there just right. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday is not at all teaching. That's what I mean by automation. I'm making a plan so I have time for everything I need to teach these courses well. And I know exactly that time lands and I've configured it in a way that its footprint is reasonable. and then I'll move on and say, okay, what am I going to do with these other three days?

Where am I going to do research? What about other meetings like committee meetings? I have a theory I'm putting together here where those are going to all happen after 2 p.m. And so the mornings are going to be just for research or writing. I'm trying to figure this all out. But that's what it looks like. That's what it looks like when I do that thinking. So that's what I'd recommend to you.

But it's also what I would recommend more broadly outside of academia. Take the work that is non-negotiable. This is a part of my job that has to have. It always has to happen, but it's predictable. And automate, automate, automate. This is when and how I do it. I don't want to have to think about it. I don't want to have to say, oh, should I prep today?

Should I prep right now? Should I prep this afternoon? Should I meet with my TAs? When should I do that? I guess I should do that soon. The stuff you know that's going to happen, figure out when it's going to happen, get it on your calendar, and then forget about having to worry about it. When you get there, you get there.

It'll get executed when it gets executed. that's the right way, I think, to most effectively deal with stuff that has to happen again and again. All right, I think we have time for one more call, and this one has to do with tracking information. Hi, Cal. My name is Chaminda Jansai Kru from Vancouver, Canada. Longtime listener and first time asking the question here. I'm quite fascinated by reading your articles, neither New York Times or your books. You have so much references.

So the question is, how do you keep track of all the references? Do you have a method? Let's say if you were to read a book or article and then you find a quote, how do you store them or how do you keep them so that you can refer back when you're doing an article. Anyways, I'd like to know your method and look forward to hearing.

Thank you for all the good work you do. Cheers. Well, when it comes to information management of this type, there's two big schools of thought. Proactive or reactive. So the proactive information managers, want to take the information they encounter when they first encounter it and put it into some sort of system.

Even before they necessarily have a specific use for that information, they want to get it into a system where it can later be retrieved if needed and in the more advanced version of those proactive systems where new novel connections can form that themselves might even help give you ideas about what you should be writing about. So this is a really big idea right now. a lot of the proactive systems you might hear about are inspired, generally speaking, by the Zetelkastin system, where you have contextual links between different pieces of information.

Information are like nodes in a graph, and you have edges that connect them. And through these connections, you can find information serendipitously. Second Brain is a concept like this. You might have seen, I think this is Diego Forte's second brain is one example of this. When I had Shreeny Rao on the show, I interviewed Shreeny Rao. He talked about his use of a particular Zettel Kasten-style note-taking system that he actually had generate for him, basically article ideas. He finds interesting connections. Then all the information he needs is there.

I largely do not use proactive systems. There's an overhead to them that I haven't yet gotten over. There's a lot of overhead to getting that information in there. my time is quite limited. So I often don't have or feel like I have that time to sort of sit back and extract things from the books I'm reading or articles that I'm reading. I'm not saying it wouldn't work for me. It's just I haven't done it. I am more of the reactive camp, which is a much more minimalist approach.

And the reactive camp is I'm working on this. I got to get a lot of information to help support this thing that I'm working on. and you go out there and you find some information for that thing, and then you work on it, and you have all that information right there to cite. Almost always, that's how my writing comes together. If I'm working on an article, then I will go out there and find sources I need for that article,

and I will keep track of them right there in Scrivener, in my research folder, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, and they're all right there. You know, that goes to the fact checker. That's where all the citations come from. If I'm working on a book chapter, similar. I have a rough outline of what I want there that outline might have some sources in mind,

but then I go out when I'm working on that book chapter and find those books and find the articles and talk to the people, and I keep track of right there for this chapter. Here's all the different sources I used. Often I'll just footnote as I write. You know, okay, here's the source, here's that source, here's this source. And I do it on demand. Now there's little hacks in here.

So when I'm book writing, for example, I will use shorthand for my references. Maybe I'll just mention the PDF name of the, article I cited or a brief description of the book title. I tend to then hire an editor to come in later and actually clean up all of those references to be in the proper style citation so that, you know, there's some hacks, there's some technical hacks there, but I'm not drawing from some very large second brains that'll cast an inspired system to get those references.

I find them as I need them. Now, what happens here is it over time if you write enough things and you have put together enough creative ideas, you have been bathed in a lot of interesting notions. You've been bathed in a lot of interesting citations. You've been bathed in a lot of interesting case studies. And your brain itself implicitly implement some sort of Zadalcasten type system. So then when it comes time, if you've been a writer for 10 years,

to do a chapter for a book on a certain topic, already off the top of your head, you get five or six good starting points. Oh, I should use an example from Lincoln. And I remember listening to a thing about Thoreau and oh, and I wrote about this guy before, and there's some stuff I learned about them that I never really got around the using.

I tend to find that stuff as relatively accessible and it pops up, and it's a good starting point, and you start with those sources and those leads you to new sources. So your brain itself actually can do a good job of implementing what a lot of these systems are trying to replace. And so that's how I do it.

It's incredibly low overhead. I'm exposed to a lot of information. I remember a lot of stuff. That's my starting point. But when it comes time to write something, that is when in the moment I begin to more systematically try to find sources. Storm right there where I'm working. It all happens more or less on demand.

It may not be the most elegant system. It may not be the most serendipity promoting, supporting type system. But it's very low overhead. And so far it seems to work. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for this episode. I'll be back next week with a new episode. and in the meantime,

Jesse and I will be working on that TikTok video. So until then, as always, stay deep.