Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 161: Should I Follow My Skill or My Passion?

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- How can a freelancer perform deep work? [9:56]- Should I follow my skill or my passion? [12:50]- How do you manage group projects in college? [21:51]- Do you recommend listening to music while doing deep work? [24:16]- What do you do when your boss has allocated you to a team “half time”? [26:20]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- How do you return to time blocking after falling off the wagon? [36:25]- How do you include non-work activities into your workday? [38:53]- How do you structure you time if you love what you do? [40:10]- How should you think about the Deep Life in retirement? [43:12]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.

This podcast is sponsored by Cynard. You know, of course, I am a big believer in focusing deeply on your work and doing one thing at a time. The problem, of course, is that most of this work takes place on a computer, which is like a distraction machine. You have access to every possible diversion information and distraction right at your fingertips. This is where Cynard can enter the scene and help. you out. Centered is an app that you run on your computer that helps you stay mindful and in flow by blocking distractions, encouraging monotasking and time blocking, playing bespoke ambient music, and even offering a coach who will nudge you if you open an app or website that's not on task. In addition,

you can get analytics about how you are actually spending your time, real feedback on how you're actually spending your time. So if you go to centered. And use to promo code deep work, one word, you will get a free month free of the centered premium service. That's centered. dot app with promo code deep work to get a free month of centered. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 161.

I'm here in the Deep Work HQ after spending two weeks, two weeks on vacation away from my microphone and away from recording, which is actually the longest I have been away from recording this podcast since I began it back in that initial summer of the pandemic. So I think that's been a good experience. I'm joined here by my producer Jesse. Jesse, hopefully you've had a productive break so far. Yeah, everything's going good. It's good to be back. You know, I have to say I was impressed when I talked to Jesse before the break and we were chatting. He mentioned that, oh, he was looking forward to the time off because he would get more time to go to the gym, which is literally the opposite of every other human's experience of Christmas break, which is I am going to do less activity.

I'm going to eat the worst possible food. So you are an exemplar of discipline for the rest of us, Jesse, so I appreciate that. Well, when you consume more calories, I guess you've got to work it off. That's the right way to think about it. Not to alarm you, but I just looked up the official CDC statistics on what is the probability that one of the two of us is currently giving each other Amacron. And according to the CDC, and I'm quoting this here, the probability is 107%. So I hope you're okay with that.

There is. So for those who don't know, we're recording this in the Washington, D.C. region at the end of December, there is a fair amount of coronavirus going around right now. I tried to look up the daily new cases statistics for the D.C. region. And they had just replaced a chart with the word everybody. So I don't know. That's not a good sign. Now, joking aside, we do, we test here in the Deep Work HQ. We do what we can to try to keep that virus out. But there's only so much you can do and life does need to go on. One thing I will say, and you haven't seen these emails, Jesse, but I get a lot of emails from listeners who say it has been good during the pandemic having a podcast to listen to, listening to our podcast. It's not about the coronavirus. It's not about news. It's not about who we should be upset at or what's going on really wrong.

But it's actually about optimistically, how can you make your life deeper? How can you make your work deeper? What can you be doing right now to improve your life? And to be able to keep that message going during good times and bad, I think has been helpful for a lot of people. And so, you know, I'm willing to take the risk to keep this coming out. I assume I have one or two weeks tops before I have my date with that virus, just given the different activities I'm involved in and the life I lead. But we will be fine. If we miss a session in the studio, I have backup equipment at home.

the deep questions train is going to keep rolling because I think it's a I think it's an important one so anyways that's that's my thoughts on that um a couple pieces of news I don't know if you watch TV Jesse but I was on the today show this morning how to go I think okay yeah I don't do people watch TV anymore yeah 100% people still watch TV I mean some people watch more focused TV like Netflix and HBO Max and stuff like that but people still definitely watch TV is my my humble brag of the day minus the humble is the Today Show was actually the last morning show I had not yet been on. So now I have the trifecta. I've done CBS this morning, done Good Morning America a couple times, but I had not yet cracked the Today Show until this morning. So there we go. I think I get

like a pen or something. So it's fine. You can you can find a, there's a clip online. It was about time block planning. We've talked about it on the show before. That's a viral TikTok sensation is time block planning. I mentioned earlier when we talked about this that I had discovered that through a TV producer. Well, it was from the Today Show producer. And so I was sort of the expert. The segment had a lot of different people who were finding sanity through time block planning and TikToking about it. And then I was the professor expert. So there's scenes of me wearing a suit jacket on campus at Georgetown, which I will say is highly unusual. There has been two other occasions in my 10 years at Georgetown that I have worn a suit

jacket on campus. A formal dinner I did once with the president of the university. And I think when I got the 10 year ceremony when I got tenure. But we have a little bit of a fiction in that in the today's show segment. They show me working in my office at Georgetown in a suit jacket. that is a highly unusual thing. With a time block planner on the desk? So interesting.

Interesting. We did not put or talk about the specific planner during the segment because that'd be a little bit crass. But they did promote it on the screen. So this is the author of the time block planner. No, actually, my office was quite empty because we had had a mold problem and had flooded during the pandemic when no one was there. There was water damage. And so it's literally an empty office. But there you go.

So now you can find them today show. So it was December 30th if you want to find a clip, I guess. Look for a time block planning clip on December 30th if you want to see me for some reason wearing a suit. The other thing I wanted to mention, because this episode is going to air very early in January. So this is relevant from my email newsletter, which if you're not subscribed to you really should be, Elmuport.com. I posted an essay right before Christmas for this year's January challenge. So I do these challenges called Analog January.

And I skipped last year. But I'm back to it this year. It's a challenge for the month of January that has to do typically with moving away from a life that's too mediated by the digital. And the challenge for this January is no Twitter. So if you're a podcast listener but not a newsletter subscriber, go to callnewport.com. Read that article. You can get to the blog there. Read that article and consider joining the analog January challenge of not using Twitter for the month of January.

Just to clarify for the people who wrote in and asked me about this. No, I don't have a Twitter account. So this is not a self-prescription. I just have been hearing from my readers and listeners that Twitter in particular in recent days has been a real particular source of anxiety. So that's why I focused in on Twitter. You'll be okay. the world will be okay without your missives. There's other ways to find out about the news.

Let me just summarize the news for you anyways. I'll summarize the whole month of January. Bad. All right? So you don't have to go on Twitter. And so why don't we take an analog January, focus on some other things, connecting with people, healthier living, developing new hobbies, trying to go deeper in your work.

Let's make January something about going deep and getting away from those shallow. So I just wanted to make sure that my podcast listeners heard about that challenge as well. before we got too far into January. You're not a big Twitter user either, are you, Jesse? No, I don't use Twitter at all. I never go on it. Yeah. I only, I don't have an account,

but you can go on to Twitter, Google people, and look at their Twitter feeds on the web. And as I've talked about before, I will do that for baseball news. So if there's something happening in baseball, that's where the breaking news is. I think it's important that I'm up to speed on breaking baseball news, but that's about it.

I also, there's a few COVID doctors that I trust and like. And so that's how I would, I'll occasionally check in on their Twitter feeds to see what articles they're linking to. But I just go, you know, I'm old fashioned. Like I pipe into like a Google browser and try to search. It's like in Parks and Rec where, what's the guy's name, Larry, Jerry. Jerry says, how do you get your, the way he gets to his email is he goes to Alta Vista and searches for how do I open my email or he searches for some of some funny funny thing. I'm like that.

All right. Enough preamble. Clearly I've been isolated too long. Let's get started with some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Urfana, who asks, how can a freelancer perform deep work? The freelancer has to create his personal brand on LinkedIn. Suppose he's a social media manager. He needs to have a social media presence.

Well, Urfana, I think this is an example of an important phenomenon to discuss briefly, which is single drop social media use. And what I mean by single drop social media use is the mindset that if there is any social media use that is necessary in your life, so something professionally or what have you, there's job applicants and you have to check for questions on Facebook or something like that, if there is any, a single drop. a social media use in the pool that is your activity time, then you have to just unrestrictedly use social media from there on out. And that's what I'm sensing in this question. That as a freelancer, there's some stuff you might want to do on LinkedIn. Maybe you have a LinkedIn pulse style newsletter and you and or you have to keep up on inquiries from people or keep up with your network. I don't know exactly what it is. But in your mind that that small amount of mandated use means I guess I just have to be on social media all the time. And that's not the case. In fact, this would be the challenge I would give you. Let us say, I said, here's the new law under a penalty of a $100,000 fine. You are only allowed to be logged into LinkedIn for 20 minutes once a week. I bet you would be fine.

I bet you would be fine. What would happen if that was the law? Well, first of all, if you were posting content on LinkedIn, you would just write it elsewhere. And during that 20 minutes, you would post it. you would make it weekly. If there were requests coming in or you wanted to do some networking, just during that 20 minutes you would answer the request and you would maybe do some pokes. Maybe you would update your profile to somehow say I do LinkedIn messages on Fridays or whatever

day you do it. Maybe you'd miss a couple things or a couple people would be annoyed that you were slow getting back into them, but who cares, right? This is a numbers game. It's just over time being on there, maybe surfaces, the occasional opportunity. So you would be absolutely fine in 20 minutes once a week. which is a negligible footprint. This is the type of exercise I want people to do when they think about unavoidable social media use.

What if I was only doing this for a very small amount of time quite infrequently? Could I really make that work? Would I get most of the value? And I think in most cases the answer would be yes. So do not allow the single drop of social media requirement in your life be the instigating force. that gets you to then endlessly lose yourself into those distractions. All right, we have a question here from Career Opportunist, who says,

are there times where it is worthwhile to follow intimations of your career interest, even if you take non-trivial cuts in your career capital, outside of the corner cases you've already mentioned in your book, so good they can't ignore you? There's some elaboration here, so we can get some context to this question. So career opportunist clarifies that he is a back-end software engineer at a large well-known internet company who has built up quite a bit of career capital in that role. He then goes on to say, my core interest in college, however, we're in front-end client-facing work as opposed to back-in software.

I'm not tied to a particular job of passion. I just want to experience building user-facing software as opposed to just behind-the-scenes code. So he says, I can either choose to become a more proficient back-end engineer, but it does feel like a less interesting route for me. But I could do that and focus instead on the opportunities to negotiate lifestyle improvements. All right. So I don't have a definitive answer, but I'll tell you my instinct here. The grudging thing you put at the end, like I guess what I could do is even though maybe front-in stuff seems more interesting,

I could get better at back-end engineering and focus more on lifestyle. improvements. I actually think that's probably the right answer. And it might not be the answer you want to hear from me. But I think at this stage of your career, the right thing to do, I'm going to guess. You haven't told me, but I'm going to guess you're at that critical stage, this roughly quarter-life stage in your late 20s, early 30s, where you're no longer starting out. You have skill, you have talent. You begin to have some options, but you're also not at that mid-life stage where there's other things going on in your life. I would say at this stage, this is an important time to do lifestyle-centric career planning.

I'll explain what that is in a second, but what I think is going on instead is you're feeling a bit adrift because, again, you've got to that quarter-life stage where you found the job, you found the skill, you have some stability, you have some ability, and now you're thinking what's next. And in our culture, and especially American culture, when I say our culture, we have this instinct that the content of our job is going to be the key driver of our satisfaction. action. So when you feel that initial tinge of malaise because you've you've reached a plateau, your culturally trained mind immediately says, well, maybe if we shifted a little bit the content

of our work, we would no longer be a drift. We would break through the malaise. So maybe it's back-in software is the issue. And the reason why I'm feeling this malaise is that I really should be doing front-in software. I think if you make that shift, it would be kind of interesting, but you'd be back in the same place in a couple of years. So now is the time to do lifestyle-centric career planning, is what I think is the answer to that feeling that so many standard knowledge worker types feel around this part in their life. Now, I've talked about this before, but the basics of lifestyle-centric career planning is that you identify what do I want my day-to-day life to be like in all of its attributes,

not what do I want my work to be like? What do I want my actual life to be like? And I want you to think about things like, where am I living? Am I in the countryside? Am I in a skyscraper? small town? Am I, you know, helping my neighbors build a barn? Or is it I am having people over commonly just shooting the breeze out on a front porch while people walk by? Or is it I'm at a underground bar scene where there's interesting new poetry being done? Whatever. What is my day

like? What am I doing? Where do I live? How much am I working? Am I getting after it or is work a small part of my job? Am I seasonal? Am I spending six months a year, not even working at all and doing other types of things and traveling around? These type of questions. What am I doing with my time? What about my character? What is my role in the community? What is my, what is the philosophies by which I live? How deep is my existential grasp of my life? All of these type of questions. You fix this lifestyle. You feel it and you taste it and you imagine a typical week or day and something that really hits those intimations of, yes, this is right. And then you say, great, what are the paths to get there?

And that's where you build your plan. And work then fits into that plan. And work then becomes a mechanism by which you make progress towards this lifestyle that pushes all of these right buttons and really resonates. And that is where, as you enter this quarter life period, your focus goes, aiming the ship that is your life towards the port that is a lifestyle that is deeper, that resonates with you. whatever those answers might be.

And again, I keep emphasizing different people have different answers to these questions. It could look very different depending on the people. That's where I'd want you to put your energy. Now, if you do this exercise, eight times out of ten, you're going to find, oh, if I have a lot of career capital and something like back-end software design, massively increasing that capital because it's easy to take good capital and make it great than it is to go from no capital to good capital, massively increasing that capital quickly and using that as a lever to take control of aspects of my life and career is almost always going to be the right thing to do. An example comes to mind from my book, so good they can't ignore you, which you mentioned. There was a very similar character in that book, someone in a very similar situation to you.

This was Lulu, and she was a back-in programmer, I believe she was databases, more like a database programmer designer, but similar idea, not front and face. worked for financial sectors. As she got better and better at that, she said, what did I want my life to be like? And she used that as a lever to build a really cool lifestyle where she did six months on, six months off. So she left the company where she was. She went to a consulting role. She was heavily in demand because she was great on this.

She would do six months on. That's roughly enough time to do one or two engagements. She lived relatively cheaply, right, with her wife in Jamaica, plane. It's a cool neighborhood outside of Boston. They had this cool old house that they were renovating. And they weren't living lavishly. They weren't living in let's go buy a really large expensive house. So then you could spend the other six months doing interesting things and scuba diving. She got a pilot's license. Her family was from Thailand. So she would go do extended visits there. And it was just a really interesting lifestyle. But she figured out what she wanted.

And then she said, what's the best way to get there? Oh, I'm a great database developer. I can wield that to get where I want to get. So that is what I'm going to suggest for opportunities is do the lifestyle-centric career planning thinking and work backwards to say, how do I get there? And then see where that takes you. So again, it's likely it might take you, will tell you almost certainly take the skill you have out for a spin and use it to build a cool life. It might tell you, however, when you do this, like you want to be running a small startup

that's front-in facing and you live kind of cheap and you're living somewhere kind of cool. So maybe it would put you to front-in-facing work, but you'll, would be pushing you there for a reason. This is part of a big picture, not just an instinct that maybe this would make me happier. The final thing I will say, if you're interested in front-in design just as an intriguing intellectual challenge, even if this exercise has you stick with back-in programming and using it as your main leverage, your main career capital lever, do some front-in work as a hobby. Build a front-in-facing website that you do as a side hustle.

or a side project that you build up and build up those skills. Build it around something you're really interested in, you know, like you're some sort of like super fan of the Matrix or something like this. I just watched that movie last night. So I'm thinking about it. Jesse shaking his head.

You're a super fan of the Matrix or something like this. And whatever. Or you're really into some, I'm not good with those Dungeons and Dragons or something. I don't know. But you know what I'm saying? Like, okay, build it about something interesting, fun, a community that you get some depth out of.

whatever it is, and you could get that experience as well. All right, so that's a long answer to a short question because I really wanted to get to that bigger point, which is I'm increasingly a big believer in this idea that stage one of your career is figuring out how to be a adult in the world who's dependable and gets things done and starts to develop a real skill to get real career capital. Stage two, deploy that capital towards a vision of the ideal lifestyle. And then stage three is actually probably going to be much less career focus. You're in this lifestyle. It's going to be much more about yourself and self-discovery. I mean, I think it sets you up for the classic midlife crisis for it not to be a crisis,

but to be a time of actual discovery. So that's my advice, lifestyle center career planning. Underrated, can't emphasize it enough. All right. We have a question here from Groupmate. Groupmate asks, how do you effectively manage group projects? in college? You don't.

You know, group mates, group projects in college are pretty hit or miss, usually pretty bad. You elaborate here that because you're a Cal Newport type, you are organized and therefore you basically end up doing a lot more work because you're not on board with the typical college strategy of, hey, this is due tomorrow. Why don't we stay up all night and do something kind of crappy? You actually want to plan your work out in advance, and so you end up doing most of the work. That is the price you pay to have your act together in college.

You're not going to love group work. The only two pieces of advice I can give is, A, avoid it when you can, because it's not going to go well for you. B, work with the very best people you can. I remember having this experience as an undergraduate computer science student with problem set groups.

and I was good at computer science. I'll put this the humble way. I was good at computer sciences, as you might have predicted based on my later career trajectory. I learned pretty quickly that there was a lot of people who wanted to be in problem set groups with me because they would get all the right answers. It wasn't very useful to me, though, right?

I would basically just do the work. And eventually I found one or two students who were really smart. And these were the students I would come back to, to work with again and again, and we complimented each other, and it made these problem set groups really effective. I actually got a note, like a year or two ago. It was actually pretty cool. I'd forgotten about it, but it was a groupmate I worked with in a lot of courses. I really liked working with, and he came across on my writing or something recently. So this is, you know, 15, 16 years later, and you sent me a note about, hey, I remember working on problem sets with you back at college.

That was pretty cool. But that was really useful. So pick the smartest people, the most organized people, can when you can avoid group projects when you can't and when all that else fails i'm just going to validate your frustration i'm not a big fan of group projects in college and so you're not doing anything wrong it's just kind of the price you pay all right moving on here we have a question from rodrigo roderigo asks do you recommend listening to music while doing deep work well it's up to you, some people do, some people don't. What I always tell people when they ask about this is that music can help you drown out other distractions and get into the mood of deep work if you practice first doing deep work

with that specific type of music. So it is a trainable thing. If you listen to the same Mozart sonatas every time you do deep work, the first few sessions you might actually find it a little bit distracting, but after a while, your brain, learns to filter it out and it can be effective. So that's the only caveat I would give. The people who use music have practiced working with that music. This can get pretty extreme.

I do tell the story sometimes of a novelist I interviewed years ago who had four kids at home. It was a very noisy home. And he had to work there. And he wrote a lot. He was a self-published novelist who did a lot of word count. And what he did in the end was got NASCAR style headphones. So they're heavily insulated and you can also play audio through them.

Because I guess at NASCAR, what you do is you wear these really insulated headset headphones, but you want the audio of the commentary playing. And he would put Metallica, would blast Metallica into these heavily insulated headphone speakers. So there was literally no sound from his kids. That's what it takes. And I have three kids. So I can attest to this. That is probably what it takes to actually eliminate the sound of your kids from your life if they're home.

and you are trying to work at home. That's what it really takes. He learned to write pretty productively with Metallica blasting in his ears. If I tried this now, it would be incredibly distracting. If I did this consistently for two weeks, my mind would easily tune it out. It would actually probably be pretty effective. So, Rodrigo, it's all about practice.

All right, let's do one more question about deep work. This one comes from Mr. S. Mr. S asks, what do you do when your boss has allocated you to a team half time? He elaborates, I worked full time on one team for my current employer. My boss has decided that we need to start on a new effort and has put me and one other person to work on this new effort.

We are supposed to spend half our time on this new project and the other half on our old team, but I feel like I'm still allocated 100% to both teams now. It's exhausting. All right, Mr. Us, here's my suggestion. Ask your boss specifically which half of my hours do you want me working on the new team. 50% as an abstract number means nothing. Should it be the mornings?

Should it be the mornings? Should it be two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon? I want to fix down, boss, the hours when I'm working on team A and the hours in which I'm working on team B. and I am going to completely segregate these two efforts. You can give a good reason for it. I'm a Cal Newport fan. Context switching is better to treat these like two separate jobs as opposed to mixing them together in one job.

But then do that. And then stick to that. If you want to have a meeting related to Team A, it has to be scheduled in Team A hours. If you want a meeting having to do with Team B, it has to be scheduled in Team B hours. If you're going to work on Team A, it has to be in Team A hours. If you're going to work on Team B, it has to be in Team B hours.

It could be splitting the day in half. It could be splitting the week in half. Thursday Friday is team B, Monday, Tuesday is team A, and we split Wednesday down the middle. But what you want here is specificity. When should this work happen? Now, there is a bigger point here I want to briefly emphasize, which is that in knowledge work writ large, a real issue we have is this push model of work allocation, where anyone can push work onto anyone else's plate, where it's up to them to figure out what to do with the mess.

This is a disaster for overload. We get way too much work on our plate because there's no one regulating this. There's no one looking at how much is on your plate. There's no one saying what is reasonable. So we end up with way too much work on our plate. Can't make progress on all of it at the same time. So that is stressful.

But it's not just stressful. Each of these things that's now on your plate brings with it some amount of fixed overhead. Emails about that work with people checking in, weekly meetings you've had the schedule to make sure that progress is being made. And so when your plate gets full enough, the fixed overhead itself can take over most of your hours, squeezing out almost any of the time to actually get work done. So it's a huge problem.

I'm a big believer in having a much more explicit allocation of work where we think through, how much can you do? How much are you doing? Does it make sense to give you something else? I call this a pull-based method because you're basically pulling work into time you have available so you're never oversubscribed

as opposed to a push method where any amount of work can be pushed towards you. This is roughly what I'm getting at, Mr. S, when I suggest that you ask your boss what hours, what days do you actually want this 50% work to be done? Because what you're doing here is actually

forcing work to account for when it's going to get done. Well, where are the hours where this is going to get done? That hour is already spoken for. You want to have a meeting here, but that hours have already been put aside for this other work. So now there's no time for your meeting. You're making explicit things take time.

What time do you want me to give to this? And honestly, I think there should be a bigger effort to do this with more work. I wrote about this in a world without email. That when it comes to, for example, service work among professors, that there should be a specific budget. Here is how many hours of service work you are allowed. to do max per week. And when things get assigned to you, you actually have to estimate how many hours you're going

to spend on it. In fact, put those hours aside. Here they are on my calendar when I'm working on this. If you want to talk to me about this, it's on my public calendar. And when those hours are filled up, nothing else can come to you. Yes, this would create a problem at first because there's all these people that want you to do things. Like, I know your hours are full, but this is important.

But you know what? That back pressure reforms the system. And less of these requests are allowed to be generated. and more of these request-generating entities have to figure out other ways to get their work done. So I don't mean to go on a big rant here, but the unregulated allocation of work and knowledge work is a disaster. It's convenient, it's flexible, but it is a terrible way to get work done. It's like running a car factory where, you know, everyone comes in and you just say, guys, there's a bunch of parts around here, you do you, like we're just going to kind of build cars. It's convenient, it's flexible, but nothing's going to get done.

Or if it does, the cars are going to get built terribly and it's going to take a long time. So it's time to start pushing back against the unrestricted allocation of work. Mr. S, if your boss wants you to spend 50-50, make him tell you what that 50-50 is. Make him live by that decision. They're now hours. He cannot get you to do work for Team A because it's Team B, hours, et cetera. And if he wants to put another thing on your plate, where are there's hours coming from. It's time to get explicit.

Don't just push stuff on my plate. I'll pull in what I actually have time for. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Now, if you are using the internet in public without a VPN, you are tempting fate. This is what happens when you connect to that hotspot at a coffee shop or an airport. Your computer or phone or tablet is sending little messages to the website you want to talk to,

in bundles called packets. Anyone else connected to that same hotspot can see those packets you're sending. They can see what website you're talking to, what you're sending to that website. You are quite exposed. A VPN can solve this problem. Here's how it works. If you use a VPN on your devices, instead of connecting directly to the website you want to talk to, you instead form a completely encrypted secure connection to a VPN.

server. Anyone who is sniffing your packets on that same hotspot is only going to see this is someone saying something to a VPN server. I have no idea what website they're talking to. I have no idea what they're saying. The VPN server then talks to the website of your choice on your behalf. When it gets a response from the website, it encrypts it and sends it back to you. So you are completely secure. You are completely private. Now, if you're going to use a VPN, I would suggest ExpressVPN as the service you should choose. There's a couple of reasons why. One, their software is incredibly easy to use.

It works on all of your devices. It's easy to set up. It's right back there in the background. You don't even know it's running. Two, they have a ton of servers all around the world you can choose, and the connections are lightning fast. So you have a secure connection out into the greater internet at very high speeds. ExpressVPN is the VPN I use when I'm on the road.

and I'm on the road a lot all over the world because I travel for conferences, I travel for computer science, I travel for book tours, and there's almost always an ExpressVPN server geographically nearby I can connect to and get that lightning fast secure connection. So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep. That's EXPR-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep. That's EXP-R-E-S-V-PN.com And you can get an extra three months free. But to get that, you need to go to expressvPN.com slash deep. This podcast is sponsored by stamps.com.

Now, if you run a small business, you know that your time is valuable. So the last thing you want to do is spend that precious time waiting in line at the post office. My Deep Work HQ is just a block away from the Tacoma Park post office. And every time I walk by there and see that line, that long snaking line of socially distance people, I can't help but think, man, I'm glad that's not me. And I'm able to achieve that by using stamps.com. Now, here's the idea. Stamps.com brings the services of the U.S. Postal Service and UPS shipping right to your computer. So whether you're sending an office invoice or doing some side hustle, Etsy shipping,

or maybe even a full-blown warehouse shipping setup, stamps.com will make your life easier. All you need is a computer and standard printer, no special supplies or equipment. Within minutes, you can be up and running and print official postage for any letter, any package, anywhere you want to send it. And once your mail is ready, you just schedule a pickup or drop it off, no traffic, no lines. and you'll get exclusive discounts on postage and shipping from both the Postal Service and UPS, so you'll save money as well. If you want to save time and money, go to Stamps.com.

There is no risk. If you use my promo code deep, you'll get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale, no long-term commitments or contracts needed. So go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in deep. That's Stamps.com promo code deep. Stamps.com never go to the post office again. And what we don't have time for is more questions about deep work.

So let's move on now to some questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Clarissa. Clarissa asks, I do a daily schedule, but how do I avoid feeling like it's redundant? Sometimes I don't need to change things. around and I skip scheduling my time block and then it snowballs into one day and then two days. The next thing you know it's a week. Well, Clarissa, let's focus in on this issue of falling off the habit of daily time block

planning and how that can snowball to many days without it. Typically, it's a sign that you're overworked. There's too much going on. Your mind is exhausted. So I think it's actually an important signal. it's not a failing. It's an important signal that maybe we need to pull back on commitments so that the amount we're doing each day is less and try to get more time off. Your mind needs time off and it's it's getting it informally by just refusing mentally speaking to do any planning. The thing I'm going to recommend that you do persist with even during these periods is some sort of bare bones tracking. So for me it's the, the metric tracking space of my time block planner. There's certain key metrics I write in there every day. I never skip that. That's sacrosanct. Now, this takes 20 seconds and you just do it at the end of the

day, right? But it keeps you at least in a mindset of I am being intentional. I'm keeping track of my life. I have not just given up on intentionality in my living altogether, even though it only takes 20 seconds. And even if what you're writing down is really bad. So if there's things you track, Like, did I read today? Did I eat well today? Did I exercise today? You're not doing all of it. You're writing that down saying that you didn't do it.

Bad or not bad? That is like a bare bones fallback plan that I'm always doing that, even if I'm not getting around to my time block planning. And then it makes it much easier. Okay, well, now let me actually go back to doing my time block plans. So do the fallback mode. So I have the very basic behavior, the metric tracking. You never stop doing.

So you never leave the mindset of I control my life and I care about what's happening in my life, even if it takes 20 seconds. And two, if you're consistently skipping time blocking, take that as a signal that you have too much going on. That's okay. It's an important signal. You need a day off. You need earlier shutdowns. You need three things off your plate.

It's useful information, not a sign that you're doing something wrong. We have a question here from Patrick. Patrick asks, how would you approach including non-work activities into my work day? Well, if it's during the actual hours of your workday, so after your time block plan begins, but before you do your shutdown ritual for the day, you just time block it. Just time block it like any other thing you would do. In fact, time blocking it allows you to find the best times for scheduling this non-work-related activity. You have some control over where that's going to fall, so it's not just happening randomly.

You're more likely to get more of it done. I do this, for example, with exercising and for sure with book reading where I'll just block off a time for book reading. The other thing you can do is to shut your days down earlier on some days. I can end my day at 3.30, full schedule shutdown complete. 330 to 530 I'm doing my leisure activity I'm really into. That's a great period. I love that end of the day period where other people are working, but you're done because you're organized and you're in control. And you can end that day early without it being a crisis because you've controlled all of your time.

You've controlled your weeks. You've controlled your semester plans. And so you might try doing that as well. But just time blocked that like anything else. All right. So we have another question here. This is also from Patrick. Patrick says, how do you structure your time if you love what you do?

I wonder if this is the same Patrick as before. It probably is, actually. Here's a little bit of an elaboration. Patrick says he's a PhD student and that he enjoys my work. Thank you, Patrick. he really loves what he's doing, but some of his leisure activities are related to his work.

So Patrick says he's researching AI, but is also interested in the epistemology of knowledge discovery from data. So he's reading philosophy and trying to write some epistemological short papers. He's also taking some MOOCs,

massively online courses, to improve his science writing skills. He's doing that in his free time after he does schedule, shut down, complete. He also reviews academic papers, and tries to eat healthy foods and reads a lot. And he's trying to figure out.

Here's what he says. As you can see, some of these leisure activities are also work-related, although not that closely. I emphasize that I enjoy doing these activities. You think this is a sustainable approach or I need to focus more on another bucket of my life. All right. So basically, Patrick, you have a cool job and you have a lot of things you're interested

in. And there's a lot of overlap between the things you're interested in and your job. And I think that's all great. and I'm not going to advocate for significantly reducing this energy and just leaving more time free in your schedule. You're doing nothing because you're being energized by this. What I would, I think what I would moderate here is commitment activities. I'm going to draw a clear distinction.

Here are things I have to do as part of a long-term commitment versus here is something I'm going to do right now because it's interesting. but it would be no problem if I didn't do it. I'm interested in it. I'm taking this online course at my own pace because I want to be a better science writer. I'm reading this book because I'm interested in the topic. I have a hobby AI project I'm monkeying around with because it seems like it's interesting. I think it's fine to have a bunch of stuff like that that you're using to free up,

to fill up your leisure time because it's not going to cause stress if it's not commitments. It's not going to cause stress if you're not going to cause stress if you're not going to cause stress if you You know, that you can put the breakdown as needed. If something in work comes up that's urgent, you can not take that course for two weeks. If there's a family emergency, it's not a big deal if you stop reading the book. So make that distinction. Keep the stuff that you are committed to, what you're doing in work, the academic projects you're working on, the mentoring, the stuff that you have to come back to and you have no options.

Keep that reasonable. Control that. Keep that footprint small. And then if you want to explore whatever in the time that remains, that's great. I think that is good. So just make that clear distinction. Filling your time with things that you can pause as needed is, I think, completely fine if you find that energizing. All right.

We have a question here from Jenny. Jenny says, how do you suspect that you're thinking about living a deep life will change in retirement? Well, I don't think it will change at all. And what I mean by that is I don't think my general framework for thinking about the deep life has to change in any substantial way as you shift from full-time work to retirement. The decisions and activities that this framework generates will, of course, change as you shift from full-time work to retirement. So just as a reminder, my framework for the deep life says you identify the buckets that are important to you and your life and your vision of a life well lived. And you give each of these buckets independent attention. You start with keystone habits and then you overhaul that part of your life.

And so you make sure that you're seeing holistically all the elements of your life that are important and that you're giving intention to each of those and making sure that they have a expression in your life. and they're an important part of your life. So what happens when you retire, it just changes what you're doing in some of those buckets. In particular, you have what I call the craft bucket, the bucket that's dedicated to work. That's going to look a lot different after retirement. Craft is still important.

You know, producing things of value, skill is still important, but you'll probably then be pushing that part of your life towards more non-professional type craft. And the other buckets of your life remain unchanged, just as important as they ever were before. Probably most of the stuff you were doing the day before you retired in those other buckets, you'll be doing the day after. Your constitution bucket for your health and well-being, that's still important, obviously.

Community, what you're doing with your friends and family and those who live around you. It's going to be just as important. It doesn't change when you retire. Contemplation, thinking through philosophical or theological issues is just as important before and after. So I think if you're living with this bucket-based approach to the deep life, it will be a seamless transition to retirement. When you do your normal introspection on each of those buckets, your craft bucket will change.

The other ones won't. And you keep going. You keep living deeply. All right. I think we have time for one more question. This one is from Nicholas, who prefaces the question by saying, not sure if you want to answer this.

Well, Nicholas, I will try to answer this. You ask, which habits are needed to be an MVP in the academic world. That's a good question, Nicholas. Adderall in lying? Is that what I wasn't supposed to say? No, it's okay.

The formula is not super complicated. If you want to be a star academic, there's three things that are preconditions. They're not sufficient. This won't necessarily get you there, but they're necessary. So, like, at the very least, you'll have to do these three things.

And typically it's a, read, and by read, I mean you do the work to keep up with the latest literature in your particular specialty. If you're a theoretician, you are reading what people are doing in the topics you study and mastering their techniques. If you're a lab scientist, you're looking at the innovations in lab scientists techniques, and you're learning from it. This is really hard work.

Reading academic papers is hard. Trying to figure out what academics is doing is hard. The top people spend a lot of time on this. Two, you're working relentlessly. you're always working on research carefully chosen projects you're always working on it at a faster pace than other people and when you finish one thing

you move on to the next the total number of hours top academics put into their research is typically much bigger than their peers where it's more seasonal they're working on something they kind of do other things for a while and they work on it

star academics are relentless about it it's priority one they try to fit in the other stuff the teaching to whatever when they can but the time is going to be on the research and then three, you attach yourselves to stars. If you want to produce MVP caliber work, you have to be training under MVP caliber people. It's very consistent. It's very difficult to break up to a higher level than you studied under.

It typically goes the other way. There's a reason why star academics are stars. You have to learn from them how they do it, how they work, what they focus on their techniques, their work ethic. So you have to work with the very best people. Now, you could do those three things and not end up a star. There's raw brain power and luck play a big role in this. I mean, especially in mathematical fields or other types of fields, there's just horsepower that matters. And I don't know how you develop it and how much of it you're born with and how much of it is the training you've done throughout your whole life or whatever.

But there's a certain just type of ability to do spatial reasoning or internal numerical manipulations. and it's just you probably have to have and some people don't. And then there's just luck. The topic you're working on works. You can't always predict that. But you're working on, you know, let's say it's 2018. You're starting a postdoc. I'm going to do a postdoc at the, you know, wherever.

And what I'm going to focus on is the phenotypic expressions of coronavirus genotype point mutations. And then the coronavirus pandemic comes. Wow, you're going to get a lot of grant money. You're going to get a lot of demand. Like, what you're doing is really, really useful, you know, that this would be a really good time. Whereas at the same time, if in 2019 you were a, you know, an epi professor at Johns Hopkins

that had just published your first book, which was a world without viruses, why we will never face a, why we will never again face a big pandemic because of, you know, the miracles of modern technology and the ability for populations to react nimbly and quickly, you know, now you're in bad, you're at a bad place. You're not going to, you're not going to do as well, right? So there is luck involved as well. But those are the necessary. Like, at the very least, you have to be mastering the literature, working relentlessly

and working with stars. And it's a focused, intense, deep work effort every day, reasonable amount. You could probably only do four hours of this a day and just repeat, repeat, repeat. Well, that's about all the time we have for today's episode. It's good to be back from my break. And thank you to everyone who sent in their questions. We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.