Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 159: REPLAY: How Much Should I Read?

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

Because I'm away on vacation these week, I'm replaying a classic show from the Deep Questions archives. This is Episode 109, which originally ran back in June. ---Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.BOOK REPORT: The Square and the Tower [04:28]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - What should I do if I like my job but dislike the industry? [12:32] - How hard should I push back against a shallow company culture? [17:06] - Is productivity only for people with certain personality types? [25:57] - What is the best strategy for an aspiring academic? [28:22] - Should I ask experts or learn on my own? [30:14] - Can you tell me more about the CIA's mail tubes? [35:36] - How do I get on the New York Times bestseller list? [41:28]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - Is there value in keeping a daily record of significant activity? [50:32] - Can I pursue the deep life if I have mental health issues? [56:46] - Are there wrong ways to pursue the deep life? [1:01:01] - How much time do I (Cal) spend reading? [1:04:48]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi, it's Cal Newport here. I'm away on vacation this week. So for today's episode, we will be replaying a classic show from the Deep Questions Archive. In particular, we are replaying episode 109, which originally aired in June. Among other things that keep an ear open to in this episode is the rare appearance of a book report segment. This was a short-lived segment where I would just review an interview. individual book, which I stopped doing pretty soon after this point. It's also one of the first times that I tackled the question of how much you should read. Longtime listeners of the show

will note that my thoughts on this have evolved since the answer I give here in this classic episode. Anyways, I hope you enjoy. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, Episode 109. Quick announcements, three quick things to talk about. Number one, I am recording this episode within the brand new remodeled Deep Work HQ broadcast studio. My goal for the summer, as I've talked about before, is to have more in-person guest. I want to do collaborative deep dives like I did with Brad Stolberg a couple weeks ago more often. and I would like when possible to have video of my conversations with people here in the Deep Work HQ because for some reason, when it comes to back and forth conversation, video is oddly compelling. Some people like to watch it.

So as I've mentioned before, this was going to necessitate a redesign of the Deep Work HQ studio so that we could actually have a two camera set up. And that redesign is largely done. So now I am at a round wooden table in my studio with, three walls covered with black drapes. So it's much more dramatic. There is a mic across from me from this table where my deep dive guest can sit. The only thing missing is the second camera and the lighting setup. My lighting camera guy hopefully will be out here soon.

So we can have a nice camera on each of the people in this room. I can switch it live using a switcher. And we will hopefully this summer get not only a lot more in-person collaborative deep dives, but good video of that. nonetheless. But even before that point, I think psychologically it's kind of nice. I talk about often how setting matters when it comes to doing

cognitive work and having a much cleaner, more professional studio set up here, having the walls covered in black drapes as opposed to a random mixture of sound dampening, and we put this diplomatically, garbage that I had roughly taped to the

wall, puts me into more of a contemplative broadcasting mood. So I'm eating my own dog food here and setting up a setting in which deeper thinking and hopefully therefore deeper podcasting is possible. Second quick announcement. Thank you to everyone who did a rating or review last week. A bunch showed up and I think it's really going to help.

So I like this idea that maybe just once a month, once every other month, I'll mention ratings and reviews so the new listeners can hear the call, but otherwise not bother you with these requests in between. I think this will work quite nicely. Finally, I am trying out a new segment in the episode today, so let me know if you like it, or if you don't like it, or if you like it but want to see something different happen with it. It is a segment where I talk about books. Obviously, given the nature of my life as a professional idea generator, I read a lot of books. My floor is usually five books a month on average.

and I get requested relatively frequently to talk some about the books I'm reading. So I thought I would try out a segment, not every week, but some weeks where I give a quick summary of something I've read recently to point you towards some potentially interesting titles for you to dive into yourself. So feedback to interesting at calnewport.com on how you feel about this segment. And with that in mind, let's jump right into this new segment, which I call The Book Report. In today's book report, I want to talk about the square and the tower. Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook. This is a 2017 publication by Penguin. It was written by Nile Ferguson.

Ferguson is a Scottish intellectual. Did his training at Oxford. Spent time as a professor at Harvard and eventually was hired away to Stanford. Hoover Institution with a few other stops along the way. I think he was at NYU for a while in the London School of Economics. Really bright guy. I think what he was known for early in his career was bringing hardcore tools from economics into the discipline of history. So if you go back and look at his early academic work, what he's doing is actually getting deep into the books. and by books, I mean ledger books, trying to actually understand the accounting,

the flow of money in historical period. So using economic analysis as a way to better understand what was actually happening in historical periods. Now that he's at Stanford's Hoover Institution, he's sort of outside, I would say, the traditional academic mainstream of mainly publishing peer-reviewed articles. Instead, he is a highly productive writer of these broad look, big think books,

where he applies interdisciplinary, very wide breadth looks at topics. And that is what has the tradition in which the square and the tower emerges. As I'll elaborate, this book is trying to basically combine network science and history. Now, I bought the square and the tower actually very early in the pandemic. So just as they began shutting things down in the March of 2020, my instinct was I better buy some books. so I'll have something to do. This is just yet more evidence that I am not going to survive when the apocalypse comes.

Other people are stockpiling food and getting ammo and I'm thinking I hope I have enough interesting books. So anyways, I put it in an order and this was March of 2020. So actually it took weeks for the order to get here because there was this period early on in the pandemic where Amazon was slowed down. Deliveries were delayed.

They were prioritizing other stuff. It was sort of obviously a scary period. So there's some psychological significance for me brought up in this book. But I ordered this book in a book about Carl Jung. I read the Jung book when it arrived. But for whatever reason, I never got into this book. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was sick. I had a cold because I have a bunch of kids.

And kids are getting all the sicknesses now. The things are opening up. And I was frustrated. I get frustrated when I'm sick because I can't do all the typical intellectual and physical things I do. And so out of my boredom and frustration, I picked up this book, sat down outside of my porch and said, let me get into it. Now, it's a long book. It's a beast. It's 431 pages, not including notes. It took me a little more than a week to get through it. But I'm glad I am. So what are the big ideas here? Well, Ferguson is looking at the big events of history from this idea that they come out of a competition between two different types of interpersonal social network structures. There's hierarchical structures where there's not very many lateral links.

Information goes up a hierarchy to a central node and back down a hierarchy. The extreme example of this would be Stalin's Soviet Russia. And then you have these non-hiercical social networks, like you get with the scientists in the Enlightenment, or you get with the revolutionaries during the French Revolution or during the American Revolution for that matter, where there's not a strict hierarchy where information moves up and down, but people are able to communicate with each other laterally, and information can flow very quickly, and it leads to a lot of innovation,

both scientific or political or cultural. And he sees history as this tension back and forth between these type of networks. Things get too hierarchical, and they get stagnant, but you can keep a culture or society in place if things are very hierarchical, because you're isolated, you can't find out about other ideas, you can't organize with other people,

and then these non-hierarchical networks, where they can arise can help destabilize those hierarchical networks and create actual cultural political revolutions. And then some more hierarchy is needed to be enforced or things get too chaotic. And you get the bloody aspect of the French Revolution. So he's trying to understand history through network science. There's some actual formal network science cited in this book where he'll really talk about an analysis that was done of the social networks of various governments and groups.

And a lot of it, though, is more discursive, more him just talking about and giving examples that capture this type of dynamic at play, even if it's not being formally analyzed. Now, here's the thing about Ferguson's style. It's not a traditional academic style or the style I would write in even where you're trying to lay out an intellectual framework. You carefully build out your framework. You support the pieces of your framework by examples, and you carefully build. build it out and nuance it, right? Ferguson has a different style. I call it hyper erudition.

He basically throws a bunch of short chapters at you, drawing from a impressively broad collection of different examples. And each of them is sort of highlighting his central thesis, but not in a highly structured, organized way. The idea is more that you let these examples wash over you one after another, and you have a sort of emergent hypothesis, as an emergent framework emerge within your own minds. You were given the ammunition to begin to reconstruct in your own mind

an instinctual understanding of the broad point he's trying to make, which is you have these two types of hierarchies that operate in tension and sort of drives the wheels of history forward. So look, I have the book right here. It's going to flip to some random things here, right? So chapter 22, we have something here about, okay, the French Revolution, and you get into the Committee of Public Safety and what was going on in the countryside and how information was flowing.

We jump forward to chapter 33. He gets really into some of these social groups at Oxford and Cambridge during the 19th and early 20th century and how they differed and their impact on British politics. There's a lot of British politics in here. So if you're interested in how different movements in British politics happens, you'll find out about it. He gets into later you get into some Trump

analysis, the 2016 election, which was still fresh when this book came out. You get some Zuckerman and Facebook analysis. Here's the thing. It's obviously a brilliant guy, and this is a very hard style of writing because you basically have to be incredibly cultivated exactly what you would expect if you trained at Oxford and then went to Harvard and did some guest lecturing at the London School of Economics and NYU before going to the Stanford Hoover Institution. You just know a lot.

You're very cultivated in that sort of British style. and you bazooka out the fragments of examples and allow the understanding the blossom. So, look, it's interesting. I think this is a, it's a big thinker with big thoughts. He's writing too many of these books to try to spend a decade to carefully lay out his framework. He's throwing these ideas into the world. I'm glad we have thinkers to do that. I wouldn't say that it's an essential book for understanding our time, but I think it's a really interesting one.

So if the idea is interesting, I would recommend it. my caveat would be you're completely safe with this hyper erudition style to skip around jump around to sample chapters where the example is something that seems interesting to you you will be no worse for the wear

you're not going to miss a key part of some sort of carefully constructed framework you can bounce around to what's interesting maybe do about 150 pages of the book and it'll probably be better for having Reddit all right and with that let us do some questions about

deep work. Our first question comes from Banach, who asks, what would you say to someone who likes his job, but not so much the whole industry? I work in an insurance sector and I like the nature of my job, but I have a more general problem with the industry. Specifically, I'm of the opinion that some, but not all products in my company, are not very good value money, not very good value for the money for my clients. Well, Binoctus is a good question. It's one that I deal with somewhat briefly in my 2000 book, So Good, They Can't Ignore You. There's a short section of a chapter early on in that book. It's actually really important and one that I find myself returning to often when discussing career questions with people. and the section is titled something like the career disqualifiers. One of the big ideas of so good they can't ignore you is that we overvalue the content of our jobs. We have been taught that there is a passion latent inside us and through self-discovery, if we can uncover it and then match it to our job, that is the key to satisfaction.

I argue in that book that actually passion tends to be something that's cultivated over time it's less about perfectly matching your job to yourself, but more about what you do when you have a good enough job. How you cultivate your professional life, it is something that is more meaningful and is more of a source of passion. So let's think less about what should I be doing and more about how am I doing it.

That being said, I wanted to make the point clear that you can't just throw a dart at monster.com and whatever it lands on, you say, okay, I'll just do that. It doesn't matter. All that matters is how I do my work. Your job choice does matter.

It's just not as important as before. And also, of course, if you throw a dart at Monster.com, you're just going to break your monitor. So that's probably not a good idea. So that's why I listed these disqualifiers. So I said, listen, some disqualifiers you should keep in mind. And it's not a comprehensive list, but things you should keep in mind that indicate this is not a job

that you're going to be able to transform into a sustainable source of passion. One of those three disqualifiers I give is that the work itself is in conflict with your values. That even if you do all the other stuff I talk about, you adopt a craftsman mindset, you develop rare and valuable skills, and then use to leverage this provides you to push your jobs towards things that resonates

in a way towards things that drain your energy. Even if you do all of that, you're unlikely to have that job remain a source of significant passion because it will be in daily conflict with your underlying values. there is a philosophical friction that creates that over time is going to generate a lot of despairing heat. So, Benak, you might be in some issues here. This might be some trouble that you're in. If you don't like what you're seeing in the insurance industry, and God knows they have their demons.

There are a lot of products. This is probably what you're talking about, that the insurance industry sells that aren't good for people. Like whole life insurance policies. This is not the right way to save money. this is not the right way to get life insurance. This is heavily commission driven. This is why when you have financial advisors that have a fiduciary responsibility, you don't see them pushing these products as much.

They're not good products, and a lot of people get fleece. And I don't know if this is exactly what you're talking about, but this could be the type of thing you're talking about. And I think it matters. If you feel what your industry is doing is against your values, it might be time to start saying, what is my career capital that I've developed, and where is there a lateral move I can make?

A move to another industry or a section of this industry that's very far from the piece I don't like. That will value the career capital I already built up, so I'm not starting from scratch. I'm not quitting insurance to become a full-time novelist. I have particular skills. So I want to use those skills because, again, your career capital is your best weapon for making your career something you're passionate about, so you don't want to throw that out if you can avoid it. It might be time to start thinking about making. one of those switches because it builds up over time. That friction will build up. You will feel

worse about yourself. It is difficult to cultivate a highly intentional deep life when in this crucial bucket of craft you feel yourself acting in conflict with the underlying values that's trying to drive this transformation. Our next question comes for Mr. B, who clarifies that the B stands for bureaucrat. So that should give you some sense of where we're going here. Mr. B asked, hard should you push back against company culture if you want more deep work but need to engage in shallow work to keep advancing. He elaborates that his company culture is one that is built around a hyperactive hive mind style commitment to rapid emailing and email responses. Well, Mr. B, there's two categories of responses to a hyperactive hive mind culture.

There's the collaborative and the personal. So the collaborative is where you're actually going to involve other people in making changes in your culture and the internal or personal or changes you're making to your own work habits that do not involve other people having to change anything about how they work. There are two key principles to keep in mind for both of these categories of change. One comes from motivational psychology. Be very wary of any strategy here that is going to potentially make other people's lives more difficult and they did not have a say in it.

we do not react well to feeling there are changes being imposed upon us without our say that might make our life more difficult. This will generate loss of friction. It's easy to fall into that trap when you're trying to move past the hyperactive hive mind culture. And the second principle we're going to keep in mind here is positivity over negativity. Simply pointing out what's wrong about the way an organization functions doesn't get you very far. makes you seem like a complainer or a malcontent. It doesn't set you up well in the mind of others. We're coming out things from a positive angle.

Hey, I'm working to be even better to produce more value to push our team ahead. This obviously psychologically goes down much better. So as we confront these two general categories of approaches to taming the hive mind, let's keep these two principles in mind. Don't impose changes on people and be positive. All right. let's start with the collaborative changes. The positivity principle says, don't go to your boss and say, stop bothering me with so many emails.

We do too many meetings. The way the team you manage operates is bad. It's not going to get you very far. Instead, you want to go when you're doing these collaborative changes to your boss or your team members, if it's more of a flat organization, and say, I want us to be even better. Now, one thing I know is that sequential work is way more effective. So if we can work on things one at a time, have some action. have some actual time to focus on things, we're going to produce a lot more work

at a lot higher level of quality. So why don't we think through some ways that we can get more of this positive thing, unbroken work blocks into our work life? Now, if you're working with the boss, one strategy that is effective here is the deep-the-shallow work ratio strategy. This is where you say,

okay, let me talk to you about deep work, let me talk to you about shallow work. Both are important. What is the ideal ratio of deep-to-shape work to shallow work hours in a typical week for my particular position. What ratio of deep to shallow work hours is

going to maximize the amount of value I produced for this team? Ensuring that I'm doing the stuff that moves the needle at a really high level, but also that I'm not falling behind on the shallow stuff that keeps the lights on. Then you agree on a ratio. And if you're a good time block

planner, aficionado, you have a great record. You can come back and say, well, here's how it's actually working. Here's how much deep work I'm getting. here's how much shallow work. If you're falling short of the ratio, you can present those numbers and say, huh, we're falling a little bit short. What can we do here? You're coming at this in a positive manner.

Like, how can we make changes to make the company even more effective? I have many people report back that the strategy works great, that bosses that they thought would be completely inflexible about changing work culture. We'll massively change work culture because now they have a clear positive goal. Oh, you're supposed to have a 50-50 ratio. You're not hitting it. What can we do? Great.

No meetings before 11. Boom. So it's coming at it positively. And they're involved. So it does not feel like you're just saying, look, I want to work from home these days, or I don't want to be bothered in the afternoon. You're not just declaring what you want.

You're working with them to figure out what's going to service the team best. Now, the more advanced, the more advanced way to tame the hyperactive hive mind collaboratively is to do what I suggest in a world without email, which is to actually sit down with the team and say, let's overhaul our processes, what's list out, all the different things we do again and again in the team that produces value. What actually makes up our team?

What actually makes up our job? What do we do again and again? And then for each, ask the key question, how do we actually want to implement this? How do we identify the work that needs to be done? How do we gather the information? How do we communicate with each other to help reach decisions or move things forward? How do we actually get to a finished product?

Now, if you haven't actually explicitly asked these questions before for one of these recurring processes, the implicit answer is probably, oh, the hyperactive hive mind. We'll just rock and roll an email and slack and kind of get things done. Well, of course, that doesn't scale. This is the core argument of a world without email. So you try to find more structured ways of implementing these processes that gets you away from the hive mind, gets you away from unscheduled messages that require a response. Now again, the key here is to collaborative principle, the principle of don't impose changes, it's a team working together.

Let's try this for dealing with client questions. Let's try this approach for producing new marketing campaigns, and we'll revisit it. If it's not working, we'll revisit it once a week, and here's our escape valve. If the system's not working, just call me on my phone or what have you. But now everyone is involved. No one is going to feel like changes are being imposed upon them.

You'll have much better buy it. So the deep to shallow work ratio is the, the easy way in to this question of collaboratively working to push back on a hyperactive hive mind

culture is going to potentially buy you some breathing room the exercise of actually going through process by process and reforming these processes to get away from

unscheduled messages to require responses well that is where you're going to get the really long lasting solution. All right, let's think about

personal changes, changes to the way you work that'll help dampen some of the worst excesses of the hive mind. here, we really need to remember this principle of not imposing changes. So if you make changes,

don't tell people about it. When you put out that auto responder that says, I'm not going to answer your email till later today to quote unquote better serve you, that is read as I'm going to make your life more difficult and you had no say in it. And that will generate friction and that will generate pushback. So if you're going to reform your internal habits to get away from the hive minds excesses, just do it. Don't make it. Don't make it. a big deal about it. And that's how you're going to put in place that principle of don't impose, don't impose new behaviors and other people without their say. And I've talked about this before. I get into this in a world without email. What you do to reform your internal

habits as similar to what you would do as a team. You say, what are the different things I do again and again in my job? For each of these, given just what I can control, how can I put in place a system or rules or guides that is going to reduce the amount of unscheduled messages I'm going to have to send and receive to get this work done. And then you begin to put in place, you know, regular times, alternative communication channels. You know, now it's, hey, just upload this stuff to this Dropbox and I'll grab it every Monday as opposed to just email me. You begin to leverage things like office hours. Yeah, just grab me on my next office hours when you have a question.

This is where you recruit people into structured processes without telling them you're doing that. You say, hey, we've got to get this report out. Here's what I suggest. I'll get a draft into the Dropbox by closing. is a business today. Then it's all yours on Tuesday. I'm in office hours from one to three. So if you have any things to discuss, grab me then. Just have your version in the drop box by the end of the day at three. I will look at it and move it into the production folder by noon on Wednesday. I've CCed the designer. Hey, designer, whatever you find in there by noon on Wednesday,

you can take and format and post. Hey, you've just recruited those two people into a process that's going to get this case study report done without any unscheduled messages to require responses, but you didn't describe it that way. You didn't give them a lecture about the hyperactive hive mind. You just sort of said, hey, here's how we should do it. They're happy. There's a plan. Boom.

So there's a lot of grounds you can make internally by just asking for each of these things that you do again and again. Is there a better way to implement these that doesn't require unscheduled messages? And the key is just don't necessarily advertise. That's what you're doing. Our next question comes from Jacob. Jacob asks, is time block scheduling weekly planning? and other New Portonian recommendations only for people with certain personality or character types. Well, Jacob, the short answer is no.

There is no way to escape the productivity funnel. If you have a job and knowledge work, there is a constellation of things you could be doing that's at the top of the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, there's things you're doing right now. You can't avoid having to go from the constellation of things you could be doing, actually doing things right now. So you have two choices. You can be intentional about how you build that funnel that gets you from the top to the bottom or you can be non-intentional and just tackle it haphazardly.

The former is to be a professional and the latter is to be an amateur. If you want to do knowledge work at a high level, you got to build that funnel. You got to organize and be intentional about what you work, how you organize and how you do it. If you don't want to do that, you can still probably keep your job, but let's be honest, you're approaching it like an amateur. I think the right analogy here is let's look at high-level athletics. Productivity to high-level athletics is like the training you do off to court. That cardio, that weightlifting, the sauna treatment, all of the work that athletes have to do to try to keep their body in peak physical condition. You want to be a professional athlete, you've got to do that work.

If you want to just play pickup basketball on the weekend, you don't need to. to. If you're an amateur, it doesn't matter so much. That's the way I see it. Now, does personality or character types matter here? Well, it does. I mean, in the sense that some people are more organized by nature. Some people get a lot of pleasure out of seeing things being organized. Some people love repetition of having highly structured days. And some people don't have that particular affinity. And they find it a little bit more difficult to do things like organize their work and be more intentional about work. But okay, here's the thing.

There's no escaping that if you want to do knowledge work at a professional level, you've got to get your act together. Whether that comes naturally or whether it's a little bit more difficult, that is the reality of highly competitive cognitive work. Our next question comes from Estrada, who asks, what is the best strategy for the immediate post-PHD life of an aspiring academic?

academic, when one is working to land a postdoc or an academic position but has some substantial free time and wants to use this time to publish or do deep ultra learning and truly master their field. Well, Estrada, if you want to make a go at an academic career, item one, two, and three that you should be focusing that substantial free time towards right now is publishing papers in the best possible venues with the best possible collaborators. really nothing else matters. Be very wary of getting distracted by self-directed learning projects or other types of efforts

that seem difficult but are tractable and you're in charge of it. No, the only metric that's going to matter in your immediate future is what did you publish, how good of a venue was it? And the way to do that is to work with the best possible people, so they'll bring up your game. So that's where all of your energy should be going, is how do I take all these little academic fires that have been lit during my PhD year and try to, actually flame them into a massive inferno. That is how do I push them into really good publications?

This is what you should be doing every day. Working on papers. You're reading the background for the paper. You're writing an aspect of the paper. You're walking every day to think really deeply about the papers. Your whole life should be, how do I produce the most and best papers in the short amount of time? You are temporarily an idea factory that's trying to produce, in this case, your model

teas are papers as many as possible. This is not sustainable in the long term, but in this immediate post-PHD period, this is what you should be doing. That is the foundation on which any academic career will be built going forward. We have a question here from Duncan. Duncan says, in a world without email, you suggest using office hours to help experts stay focused. For the people seeking help from the experts, is it better to queue up problems while waiting for office hours or to spend time trying to figure out solutions on their own. Well, Duncan, the answer is both.

So one of the real advantages of office hours is that if you have a subject matter expert that's only available in certain times. And now anyone who needs to ask them a question has to wait until their next available times to ask the questions. One of the key advantages you get is that a non-trivial amount of these questions will be resolved on their own. See, in the moment when a question arises, what you have generated is a cognitive obligation, something that your mind needs to keep track of. This is a source of stress. So if you're in a hyperactive hive mind environment where there are no, let's say, office hours, there is immediate relief in shooting that out of your mind and towards someone as quickly as possible. Just you're typing as fast as you can into the Slack channel or email. you know, hey, Duncan, do you know anything about X?

So we're so quick to send those off that when we are forced to wait, when we're forced to say, well, let me write this question down in my Trello board where I have a column for questions to ask Duncan at the next meeting or what have you. It enforces a moment of reflection. And it might not even be that big of a moment of reflection. You're just trying to write out your question on a Trello card. 30% of the questions can be solved in that moment. Because we're so quick when we're in a pure hive-minded environment to just get this stuff out of our heads that even things we could very easily make some progress on ourselves get thrown out because we just don't want to have to deal with the obligation.

But once we get rid of that option that I can get this thing out of my head, obligation hot potato, really quickly, and are forced to spend a little bit more time. A lot of progress is made. Now, of course, there's still going to be a lot of questions that you don't know the answer. or two even with some reflection, then yeah, cue them up for the next time you meet that person in their office hours. The Trello column dedicated to such questions, I think, is a really good way to do this. I've talked about this before on the podcast, but when I was the director of graduate studies

or the computer science department at Georgetown, I had a standing meeting each week with my department chair and with the grad program director that I would work with as well. and I had a dedicated column for each of these people for what to discuss at the next meeting. This was so useful. Like when something would come up, I feel that obligation. I need to get an answer to this. It's in my head. The hyperactive hive mind instinct is like, let me bother my department chair.

Let me bother my program director with a hastily written email. It temporarily gets this thing off on my head. But what's that really going to generate? It's going to generate five or six back and forth messages that are going to pile up in my inbox with all these other messages, and it's going to generate much more distraction and stress in the long term. To be able to instead just throw it onto a card under that right column and then know when we get to our next meeting,

I would just load up that trailer board, load up that column and go boom, boom, boom, through them. It was exponentially better. It saved dozens and dozens of unscheduled messages requiring responses and the accompanying context shifts and sense of clutter. it really was fantastic. One of the changes, one of these small changes that made one of the biggest impacts on the quality of my work life was having those to discuss columns in my relevant Trello boards. So that's why I said the answer is both, Duncan, have those columns for the people that you meet on a regular basis or for the experts that maybe have office hours. And by the way, even if they don't have office hours, you can impose them on them without them knowing.

you're building up a list of questions and like once a week on Wednesday you're going to bother them when you see them you're both in the office on Wednesdays and you usually see them in a staff meeting and you think I'm just going to bother them with all my questions then. They don't know that I see this as office hours for them

but I'm going to make it office hours. That's fine too. You're going to build up these questions thoughtfully in these Trello columns. That's what I would suggest. Or you could do it whatever. In a Microsoft Word document or in a text file or in your bullet journal,

wherever you keep track of information. Again, I'm relatively too agnostic here. Just clarifying your question will solve 20% of them, maybe even more, and the rest will be off your mind until you see these people next. And of course, as the time goes on, as you're getting closer to whenever these next meetings are going to be, these next office hours are going to be, as new information comes in, new nuances on your question arises, you can just keep updating wherever you're listing this queue of questions on the back of your trollocard in the Google Doc where you keep track of this stuff. So it gets more sophisticated and more clarified what you're going to ask over time. So when it comes finally time to answer it, you're clear about what you want. You're doing a highly efficient synchronous back and forth conversation. It really, I got to tell you, Duncan, it makes a huge difference when you approach the extraction of knowledge from your colleagues in this more structured, periodic framework.

Our next question comes from Alicia, who says, I'm reading your latest book, a world, without email and loving it. Can you tell me more about the mail tubes? Well, for those who haven't read this book, Alicia is referring to the pneumatic tube inner office mail system that the CIA built at the CIA headquarters in the mid-20th century. Now, this was actually something I first researched and wrote about in a New Yorker article that predated the book, And then I took this idea and brought it into the book as well. And so I wrote this New Yorker article a few years ago titled Was Email a Mistake.

And I opened on this story of these pneumatic tubes in the CIA headquarters. And I actually spoke with the head historian of the CIA Museum. So they have these historians there and they have this museum. It's a museum you can't really visit. It's really interesting. But they have some exhibits online. And I got into it with them and got a really interesting history of this pneumatic tube system. Now here's how it worked.

If you're at the CIA headquarters and, you know, 195 or something like this, and you had a message you wanted to get to somewhere else in the headquarters building, there's no email. Now, you could write this up in a memo and put it into a folder and write the location on that folder and put it into a mail slot. And then at some point, a mail guy would come around and put in their cart, and eventually it would make its way to that part of the building.

And then there would be another guy with a car. cart over there and they'd walk around handing out these memo envelopes to people. This was the standard cliched mail cart. It's the main way inner office asynchronous communication occurred. This was before email. This was before voicemail. And the pneumatic tube system was an alternative. You would write your message on a piece of paper.

You'd put it in one of these plexiglass tubes. And there's dials on the top where you would dial in the location. And then you would put it into a, a tube. tube, a pneumatic tube, and this tube would shoot through a sorting system. So there was actually electromechanical sorters that could actually interact with these dials and move your

capsule towards the right destination within the massive CIA headquarters. Then once it got there, there was someone on the other end who had received these capsules, take out the messages, and then hand-deliverum that last 20 feet to the right desk. This was

essentially a packet-switching network that was analog that used mechanical means and compressed air and plexiglass capsules instead of

digital signals on a wire going through a router to efficiently move messages around the CIA headquarters. Yeah, a really cool system. The reason I wrote about it in that article and then later in a World Without Email

is because it underscored the length that people would go through to solve a critical problem in office productivity, which is once the office got large, how do we do efficient asynchronous communication? The office getting large in the 20th century was a big deal. We were used to offices being small. Most collaboration would happen with the hyperactive hive mind, the non-digital hyperactive hive mind. We were all just in the same room, right? It was Scrooge's counting house in the Christmas Carol. You needed something you just asked someone.

It was Michelangelo's workshop. Everyone was in the same room. If you needed someone, you just grabbed them. The arrival of the big office made this more complicated. You couldn't just grab them. Now there was 16,000 people or 1,600 people instead of 600, over a skyscraper instead of all in the same small row house. Now, the telephone helped.

So now you had a way of calling people without having to actually go find them, But this was a synchronous tool. They had to be on the other end of the line to do this conversation. So what was needed, the killer app of large office productivity was a way to do asynchronous communication. So I will send you a message when I am ready. And you can consume it when you are ready to do it in a way that was still fast enough that you could do non-trivial collaboration throughout the day. So the mail cart was too slow. Maybe you could get one or two messages to someone in a day.

We wanted to do this. We wanted to do it fast. This was the killer app. It was so important that the CIA built this steampunk email system to try to enable it fast asynchronous

communication. Now, most people, of course, could not afford what the CIA could. Most people could not build these massive steampunk communication systems, but this all became moot in the 1980s when Ethernet came along in the first practical, scalable

digital computer network technology. Now, everyone could have fast asynchronous communication. Instead of it being tubes and capsules, it was digital packets and email. And it was one of the reasons why, if not the primary reason why email spread as rapidly as it subsequently did in the early 1990s is because this had been this huge problem. How do we do fast asynchronous communication?

And email solved it beautifully. It was cheap and incredibly effective. And the fax machine went away. voicemail became a minor part of the office. Inner office memos became much rare. Email could solve all of these problems. So that's where the story of the tubes came along. It was trying to underscore the importance of the problem that email solved.

I wanted to underscore that importance so that we understood why email spread so quickly once it did get here. All right, let's do one more deep work question. This one comes from Talia. Talia says, hey, Cal, congrats on another New York Times bestseller. Any advice for authors traditionally published who are hoping to someday get on the list with, say, a book they're writing that will also be published by Penguin in 2020. Thanks.

Well, Talia, I appreciate that. You were right. It rolled without email. Did debut on the advice and how to New York Times bestseller list, which I will add within the various nonfiction bestseller list. That's the hardest one. it also made it onto the New York Times monthly business bestseller list. So they only do business bestsellers once a month.

So they add up sales over a whole month. So how do you get on the New York Times bestseller list? The most important thing is you need to sell 7,000-ish copies in your first week. So that's going to largely be from pre-orders. Everything that is pre-ordered counts as a first week sale. So it's going to be a large amount of pre-orders, but it can't be in time. entirely pre-orders because the New York Times adds two elements to their bestseller list decisions beyond just raw sales. And I'm roughly estimating this year because there is some obfuscation exactly how their list works.

So I'm being a little bit – I'm not conjecturing here, but I'm being a little bit approximate here. So sales matter most. You're going to need five to seven thousand copies depending on the list and the week to have a shot of making the list. they also do some surveying of actual bookstores. So if those sales are entirely Amazon pre-orders, you're not going to make the list. They also want to hear from actual, let's say, independent booksellers that, yeah, this book is selling in our store.

Right. So this is why, you know, you'll see a lot of people with very large online presences, huge list who sell a huge amount of books to their audience and are very frustrated. They say, why was I not on the New York Times bestseller list? I looked up my numbers in BookScan, and I looked up the numbers of this book that was on the bestseller list, and I sold five times more. Well, this is one of the big reasons why that is true, because it also has to be a book that's selling in bookstores. That's going to involve actual coverage, typically actual real publicity coverage, so interviews, articles, etc. That's how people can discover the book that aren't necessarily in your audience, and therefore they might buy it.

at their local store or through other booksellers. That's crucial to the list as well. So you've got to get the 5 to 7,000 copies of pre-orders. A lot of that can be from your own list, but you also have to get enough publicity coverage to get just enough sales from people who don't know you already that you will pass that New York Times filter of, is this a book that's actually making a cultural impact

or is it just someone with a very large audience? And then finally, there's just a black magic editorial aspect to the selection. I mean, they look at the books and their sales numbers and this other information, and there is some decision that's made about what's going to go on to the list. And so there, your branding as an author matters. You know, I made a big shift between deep work and digital minimalism where I really portrayed myself and all the publicity I did with portfolio.

We really pushed the idea that I'm an academic and a thinker. I'm a technologist as tenured computer science professor. highly trained. I'm at Georgetown. I have my doctorate from MIT. Who is commenting on the impact of tech on culture? So I branded myself away from an advice writer towards a public intellectual. And I think that matters, right? So now the New York Times is making their editorial selections as well. However that enters into the equation, I'm trying to make that editorial selections, the more they see you as an important thinker with a culturally relevant thing to say, the more likely you are to pass that editorial bar.

And again, all of this is a little bit obfuscated, so I can't give you an exact formula. But as far as I can tell that, that 5 to 7,000 sales mark is for sure. You definitely need that. It can't just be from your list. So you need that the publicity there is going to matter. And your branding has to be something that is going to appeal to that editorial aspect of the list. So that's what I can recommend, Tally. I'm sure that's all easier said than done,

but I also think it's less mysterious than people think. I mean, in the end, it's really just you've got to sell that many copies. The other two things are not that hard to get if you're a traditionally published author at one of the big publication houses. So in the end, it just becomes a number game after that. Is your audience big enough to get you to that 5,000 to 7,000 copy mark? This podcast is sponsored by Blinkist. As you've heard me say before,

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So go to commenter.com slash deep to save $20 on your first time. order, a new day has arrived on earth for coffee. And you can find out more atcometeer.com slash eat. Let's move on now to questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Patrick. Patrick asks, do you see any value in someone keeping a daily record of significant activity in their life?

If so, do you have any tips or pointers for managing this? Patrick, the short answer is yes. This was a big change I went through maybe three years ago, where I began to track daily metrics related to all of the key areas of my life. So not just work-related metrics, but family-related metrics, health-related metrics, community-related metrics. When I released my time block planner last year, it includes, on the daily, pages for every day a space just for tracking metrics and that's because I

was designing that planner to be what I wanted to use myself and I track metrics every day. I used to use a Moleskin weekly planner which had a small box for every day of the year and that's where I was tracking my metrics and now I used my time block planner

to do so. They give you an example of the type of things I track. Deep work hours of course I've always tracked but I'm also going to put in there for example steps whether I did my exercise routine, some key metrics about what or how I ate that day. There's something in there involving my kids. There's something in there involving gratitude.

There's something in there involving conversations, non-trivial conversations with people. And that's not even all of them. Now, I was a little nervous to make this shift because a lot of people share this same concern that if you have these things you're tracking every day, but you're going to be imposing a soul-deadening structure. on your life. You're going to add this constraint that is going to rob you of spontaneity that's going to put you into a mindset of all that matters is mindlessly trying to hit my numbers on my

metrics and it will make life somehow mechanistic, less creative, less authentic. I was worried about that. But there was two sources that pushed back against me. One was my friend Brian Johnson. You know, you just heard me in the last ad read talk about Optimized. Well, Brian is the guy who found it optimized and all of the content. and optimized comes from Brian. He is a huge proponent of this type of metric tracking.

He had been on my back about it for years when I finally started doing it. His argument was basically, you have to do the things that matter consistently if you want consistently for your life to improve. The other influence here was maybe unexpected, but the former Navy SEAL Silver Star winner leadership guru Jocko Willink. And really push this message, discipline is freedom, where he was saying, look, doing the important things in a disciplined fashion, which means you do them even when you don't want to, you do

them even when it's hard. It's not about constraint. It's about freedom. It's about freedom in the sense that it opens up a lot more options for you. When you're disciplined about your health, you open up all of the options of being in good shape and having good health, all the things that will open up. when you are disciplined about your money. It opens up all of this options because you don't have the stress of being low on money or out of money.

It opens up options for what to do. In his formulation, it is the disciplined person who often ends up much more free than the haphazard person who is constrained to the arbitrary issues or crises of the moment. I then added into this thinking a third idea, which is, well, discipline is also resilience. Hard things are going to happen. Can't control them. These hard things are going to be unfairly distributed. You could roll the dice and hope that things go okay for you, or you could try to build a life now that's going to be resilient for the hard things that follow. The disciplined treatment of resilience building activities, the connection, the community, the gratitude, the reflection, the reflection, the reflection, the reflection, the reflection, the reflection, the reflection, the reflection.

the meditation, whatever it is. The faith that you come back to those again and again, and the deep well that builds makes it much easier for you to feel like you are grounded during the hard times. That you have efficacy, that you have autonomy over your life, that you can do the things that are important, even when it's not easy, even when hard things are happening. You cannot underestimate the value of that. The person who discipline in a discipline style returns to key things, the different buckets of the deep life, are just straightforward, much more likely to get through hard times

without either falling apart or having to result to numbing, be it chemical, be it technological, etc. Discipline is freedom, discipline is resilience. And so with some trepidation, I entered, I began my discipline system of tracking metrics, and I have done it religiously ever since, and it has been fantastically effective for me. I think it has deepened my life,

It has opened up opportunities like Jocko talked about. It has given me resiliency when hard times follow. When, let's say, worldwide pandemics pop up out of nowhere. Let's say when there's family health issues, been phenomenally useful. And so, yes, Patrick, I'm a big believer in it. Don't overthink what you track. The key is to evolve that over time, but start tracking. Have a physical thing where you track these metrics every day.

Use shorthand so you can do it really quick. It should take you no more than two minutes to record your metrics at the end of the day. At first, you'll have to print out a cheat sheet. Here's the things I track and here's the shorthand I use, but you'll internalize that after a week or two. If you use a time block planner, put them into metric tracking block. If you don't use the time block planner, just get a small notebook that preferably has a space for each day, or you can even just label a page for each day. But start tracking the things you think that matter.

Evolve over time what those things are. It is the foundation of improving your life. It is the foundation of freedom. it is the foundation of resilience. So yes, I am a fan of this strategy. Our next question comes from Mary. Mary says, Do you have strategies for engaging in the deep life

when consistency is difficult because of mental health issues? I'm a tenure track academic who has had fairly good success in my field, enjoys my work, and feels a good fit with my institution. I also actively, however, managed bipolar disorder, which brings with it periods of depression

that result in absolutely no motivation, brain fog, lack of energy, and the inability to concentrate. Well, Mary, let's be careful first about semantics. No, you used the phrase engaging in the deep life. This tells me that what you have in mind when you think about the deep life is actually something quite narrow, and in particular, a craft portion of the deep life in which you spend lots of time doing uninterrupted deep work. So what you're really saying is I can't always do long portions of uninterrupted deep work because of the mental health issues with which I struggle.

Now, my response is going to be that's not the definition of the deep life. The definition of the deep life where all of the value and meaning comes out of it is this notion that you identify the areas of your life that are important and you act with intention to the best of your ability given yourself. circumstances to focus on the things that matter in each of these areas and reduce the time spent on things that don't. The value here comes from the commitment, from the focusing intentionally on what matters and not getting too caught up into things that don't.

The value does not come from a particular outcome. It does not come from, I always work deeply. It does not come from a certain number of deep work hours. It does not come from a certain level of professional success or certain outcomes occurring in your personal life. Why? Because there's all sorts of obstacles. Mental health issues are incredibly common. Unexpected, catastrophic events is another thing that happens all the time. You know, what happens when you get really sick? What happens when a family member dies? What happens when the

institution where you work goes out of business and your skills were more narrowly specialized than you thought and it's hard to find other work and you go into financial trouble? What happens when you're going through a messy divorce or you're having a bad relationship with one of your kids. There's so many things you can't control that an outcome approach to the deep life is not going to be sustainable. It's not going to be replicatable. What matters is the commitment and the intention. And so, yes, there are obstacles. You have an obstacle in particular to the craft bucket of your deep life vision that you're not always going to be able to work in a particular way. Great. Here's the reality. How do we then shape our

approach to that bucket, the focus on what we can control, put our energy on the things as valuable, and not get too distracted by the things that aren't. And what about the other buckets in the deep life? Are you servicing them well? Are you building up that resiliency in those buckets so that when the time gets cognitively hard, you have these other things as a backstop, these other things as a foundation, a strong floor that is hard to fall through? The things you come back to again and again, whether you feel like it, and because that you have some stability. if anything, the pursuit of the deep life in the way I talk about it is probably even more important. It's more important in the life of someone with struggle, which is, by the way, almost everyone.

It's just a struggle looks different for different people. More important than the rare person whose life more or less is just going well. So that's what I would say, Mary, is focus on in each of these things, given my current circumstances, how can I put my energy to the things that matter, knock it too caught up in the things that don't? will look very different in the throes of, let's say, a depressive period than it will in the throes of a highly productive period in which that's not occurring. Sure. And that's outcome focus. What matters is in each of those moments, are you to the best of your ability, finding a way to put your energy towards the high value and not get too caught up in the low

value, even if the definition or the magnitudes of those values can wildly differ during different periods of your life. Our next question comes from Martin. Martin asks, are there wrong ways to pursue the deep life? First of all, thank you for answering my voice question in your listener calls many episodes. Because of that advice, I have already started to work shorter days, and because of that, I'm now working in a more focused way. Most of the new free time this generates is spent with my son, as I've decided to pick him

up earlier and spend quality time playing, reading, or doing spontaneous creative projects with him. I also spend more time reading, especially Stoic philosophy is getting my attention. All of the things I spend more time on are based mostly on a gut feeling. What do I want to spend time on? In your experience and your engagement with your audience, do you think there are wrong ways to pursue a deep life, or is the intentional act of starting enough? Well, Martin, getting started is incredibly important, and I love what you're doing. I love what I'm hearing here. More time reading philosophy, much more time with your son. What I'm going to add on to what you're doing is a nudge towards some more structure to your

thinking here. So I would actually write down somewhere. Here are the areas of my life that are important. There is my work. There is my family. There is my mind, my intellectual life, etc. and actually write down for each of these things, your plan for making sure that you are with intention focusing on what matters there and not getting too caught up in what does it. Now, the way I often advise doing this is in two steps.

First, just begin with some sort of keystone habit for each of these areas, something that you do on a regular basis and your intellectual life bucket, for example, you might have a keystone habit of reading a certain amount every day. for example. Then with a little bit more time and a little bit more contemplation, you can take each of these areas one by one and then do a overhaul. A larger overhaul of that area of your life where you really get clear about here's the things I'm not doing anymore. Here's the things I want to do on a regular basis. Here's my project. Like for this semester I'm trying to build a reading shed where I'm going to build a library or whatever, right? So it's a combination of habits. It's a combination of prohibitions.

It's a combination of projects. that really amplifies that area of your life. And as I talked about in my answer to Mary's question before, focuses you on putting energy where you get big returns and not wasting energy on the places that don't give you big returns. And then once you have gone through each of the areas and done this overhaul, repeat on a semi-regular basis. So you are doing this informally right now,

but perhaps a little bit haphazardly. Your gut is telling you I want to spend more time with my kid. Your gut is telling you I want to spend more time reading. Your gut is smart. But let's clarify what your gut is saying. Because when you clarify it and you write it down and then you return to it and ask the question, is this really working or do I want to make changes? That's where you begin to polish and optimize your lifestyle. And over time, it's what's going to push you towards increasingly radical and increasingly fulfilling and interesting and meaningful ways of living.

It's going to push you towards increasing depth. but that process of lifestyle evolution actually needs something to evolve. You need to write it down. This is your lifestyle genetic code. You can't have these positive mutations in evolution until the code itself is written down. So that's all I'm going to say, Martin, you're doing great. It'd just be a little bit more clear and a little bit more systematic about what you are already doing instinctually. And you're going to get even more value out of this deep information you have.

that the pursuit of more depth is important. All right. I think we have time for one more question. Our last one will come from Lundner, who asks, when and how do you personally allocate time in your day to read? Well, Lundner, I highly value reading. I think the constant engagement in ideas

from a variety of different types of books and types of sources is critical to my intellectual life. it's critical to my professional life and a real priority for me. Now, the way I do it is I tend to track books these days. I try to hit five books a month as a baseline. The other way to do this is to focus on daily chapters. So I've talked about this before. The two-chapter a day rule is probably the best way to develop a reading habit.

Two chapters of something get read every day, at least. This will add up to a lot of books as well. So either would recommend. I would say what I do five books, five books a month is a lot more than two chapters a day, but two chapters a day is a good baseline. Now, how do I find daytime to do this? Well, there's some regular occurring reading times. I read first thing in the morning. I'm usually one of the first people up in my household. I also read at night. I'm usually the last person up. So there's this beginning of the day, end of the day reading that's always going to happen. Between

Between those two things, I make reading basically the default activity. It's something that I want to do more of whenever I can. If I can get some downtime, read. Can I grab 30 minutes to sit on the porch and read? Do so. Is a meeting canceled? Why don't you read for 20 minutes? And I try to go to scenic places to do it.

I have my big leather chair. I have my porch. I will sometimes read in a field. I have a reading space in my HQ. So I have all sorts of places to go to read to help get into that mindset. But I make it a default activity. Now, if you're wondering how much reading you will actually have time to do if you make a default activity, I recommend just look at that screen time report on your phone. I don't use social media.

I don't web surf. That takes up a lot of time for a lot of people. Now, if you take that time out of your life, imagine if you spent just a quarter of that time reading, you already would be much on your way towards something like my, you know, one book every five day type pace. So keep that in mind. We have more time than we think. Well, that's how I do it. Morning, night, and as a default activity,

something I look forward to and get a lot of pleasure out of. There's some concern that if you have these reading metrics, like two chapters a day or five books a week, that it's going to take some of the authenticity out of the reading experience because you feel like you're trying to hit your numbers. A little of that does happen. But the value comes out of doing the reading itself the ideas you engage with,

the intellectual life it helps cultivate. So I have found that that slight sense of contrivance that you get from having these hard reading goals is a fair trade for the significantly increased amount of reading it puts into your life. Just like having a contrived way to get yourself to exercise is different than just spontaneously feeling like I'm in the mood to exercise. But you do the work one way or the other. You're going to be healthier and the reward is there. And that's the way I think about reading. However you need to get there, spending time on the page is the way to do it.

So one challenge to try Londoner is just take one week, just take five days if you want to make this easier just during the work week and say out of work, no social media, no looking at the internet on my phone. On board, I read. Just try that for one week and see how much reading you actually get done and see how it makes you feel. Big believer in the reading life and all that's how I get it done. I'm also a big believer in wrapping up this week's episode. One of the downsides of my new studio configuration is that my body's not used to it. I'm getting a bit of a crick in my neck, so I have to adapt to this. So I'm going to go take a break.

Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit your own questions. I will be back this Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. Until then, as always, stay deep. Thank you.