Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 169: How Do I Manage My Time?

Episode Date: January 31, 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.Video from today’s episode: https://tinyurl.com/b2rkctfjCORE IDEA:  Time Management  [4:37]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:- What does deliberate practice look like for computer programming? [30:15]- Is it rational to quit your job if it implies a potential harm to society? [36:04]- When is deep work not the most important metric? [39:04]- Should I stay a job where the management actively tries to stifle productivity? [42:46]- What are your (Cal’s) tips for a mother of two small kids getting her masters? [51:15]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- Is raising kids part of the deep life or an obstacle to achieving it?  [1:00:22]- Is listening to audiobooks just as beneficial as reading hard-copy books? [1:04:55]- How do I accomplish a digital detox when all of my leisure involves my phone? [1:06:07]- How can high school students excel without SATs? [1:11:06]- Should I worry about social media getting me fired from my job? [1:12:21]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.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 169. I'm here, as always, in the Deep Work H.Q. Happy to announce that. Jesse is back. Jesse, you look healthy and hail over there. I'm doing okay. It's good to be back. I forgot in just the two sessions you weren't here,

how much time it takes me, how slow I am. And all the clicking and dragging that is involved, manipulating the computer to actually record these episodes. I got spoiled with you being here. When I had to go back and do it by myself, I was like putting a two-year-old on a computer. It's like, let me click on that and let me, it took me forever, man. So I'm glad you're back. Let's put it that way.

Yeah, it's good to be back. Thanks for having me back. You look good. You're healthy, everything fine? Yeah, I'm doing totally fine. I was, you know, followed the protocols and now I'm back. Yeah, now I think if my reading of the medical literature is correct, because you have had vaccine shots and you got COVID, you are now, and I believe this is the technical term, immortal. Do I have that right?

I don't know if I have the science quite right, but that's what I understand from Med Twitter, that you are now immortal. That sounds good. I'll take it. That'd be an interesting turn for our show if we just had a large segment each week that was just us giving. terrible COVID advice. It was just it was just so wrong. I'm like,

Jesse, I'm not sure if you know this, but users of the time block planner, 70% less likely to be mechanically ventilated. So let me just put that out there. Did we just get kicked off YouTube? Hopefully not. We just had the channel.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, maybe this would not be the best idea. YouTube, that was satire. The time block planning. has no association with with COVID COVID outcomes yeah maybe we should maybe we should stick with uh

stick with this type of advice but there is a connection because uh while Jesse was in COVID isolation that actually gave enough time for us to get the YouTube channel launch that is that is rolling right now we're excited about it Jesse what's the update what do we need to know about the YouTube channel everything's rolling fine everything's rolling we know we're in the first stage so all the videos are up we got to fix some of the music, which I'm in the process of doing because people said it's too loud, which going back on it,

they were right. And then we'll continue to fix the thumbnails and stuff. We had some good fan feedback about some stuff and they had some good advice. We're going to implement that and then keep on putting out a lot of videos. And what's the timeline people should expect? So if you're listening to this episode, let's say the day it comes out on a Monday, what's our rough timeline for when you can expect the video of each of the questions in today's episode to then be on YouTube. Pretty much within that day, maybe in the next day, but going for like in a month, like definitely that day.

Oh, okay. Actually. Yeah, that's my goal. Yeah, that's even better than I thought. So, all right. So as you know, audience, every question, every deep dive is going on to the YouTube channel with its own standalone video. So you can now go back and review, save, share, whatever you want to do with the individual

questions that particularly interest you. And as Jesse just said, within a day or two of these episodes going live, you should be able to find those questions. Right now, we have some basic playlist on there. I think we're doing full episodes, deep dives, deep work questions, deep life questions. As we put more and more videos up there, we'll put more refined playlist, sort of sub-topics that are popular. So feel free to send suggestions about, hey, what playlist would you like to see, et cetera.

right, Jesse, can they send this right to you? Is that your Jesse address? Yeah, it works. It works. I always email with, I forget the one guy's name, but I was email with the one guy and he gave some really good advice. There we go. All right.

So thoughts on the YouTube channel, be it like what playlist we should break these videos in or technical things about whatever. Jesse at Calnewport.com. Jesse is the maister of the YouTube, so he will take a look at that. All right. I want to do a deep dive today. It's a new special class of deep dive that I just want to briefly motivate. So I want to do a series of deep dives, maybe not every episode, but on a lot of episodes in the near future, that I'm calling core ideas.

And the idea is to go back and revisit the big ideas from my writing that we talk about all the time on this show. listeners who have been here since the beginning know these ideas pretty well. I've talked about them before. But for newer listeners, for newer viewers, they don't always know exactly what we're talking about or what the details are. And now that we have the ability to post video of just these segments,

I thought we should have a deep dive on each of the core ideas I talk about so I can just reference it. Hey, if you need to remind yourself about the deep life or my time management philosophy or, or career capital or what have you, just go watch the core idea video and you can quickly get back up to speed. So we're going to start that today. Today I want to do my first core idea deep dive, I should say my first core idea deep dive.

And the topic I want to do it on is time management. So my goal here is to give a brief summary of my thinking about time management. And what that's going to consist of is let me define for you what I mean by time management. Let me give you the three principles in my writing and on this podcast we always talk about that any good time management system should probably satisfy. And then I will briefly talk through my particular system, which we can think of as one example of a time management system that satisfies these principles. So you can do something else. But so you see what a real fully fledged time management system.

system that satisfies these principles look like. And then I'm going to have a bonus fourth principle I want to talk about that debatably is not really about time management. It lives right outside time management, but it's related. So I'm going to talk about that briefly at the end. So that is my agenda for this core idea discussion on time management. So let's start. What do I mean by time management? For me, at least in the context of this discussion, I'm thinking about work. So time management in work, the way you deal with your time outside of work is a little bit different. So I'm going to put that aside.

And in the context of work, I'm going to define time management to be whatever philosophy, process systems, or rules that you deploy to make decisions about what you're going to do right now with your time. How do you figure out it's 1226 on a Friday? What do I do next? in the end, that's what a time management system is, a way to help you answer that question in as useful a manner as possible. Now, everyone who works has some sort of time management system they're using. If you don't know what it's called, if you can't tell me the details of it, if you've never thought about that, it's just a really bad one probably. But you still have one.

One way or the other, you're making these decisions. The question is just how do we want to make these decisions? what is going to work better. So I'm going to give you the three properties I think any good time management system should have. I love alliteration. Long-time listeners of the podcast know this. I love C's in my alliteration. As long-time listeners of this podcast know.

So I name the three key properties here with three C's, capture, configure, control. Let's talk about these each briefly in the abstract. and I'll tell you about my system that satisfies these. Number one, capture. I believe a good professional time management system needs to have some place in which you store all the information that's important to making decisions about what you need to be doing

and what you should be doing. That is trusted. It's a place that you are going to look at. Things that go in there will not be forgotten. These ideas get out of your head and into a system so you're not wasting brain cycles on trying to remember or keep fresh stuff that you need to do. Now, in the context of tasks, we can give credit to this idea to David Allen. So David Allen in his seminal post-computer time management book, and I mean that very specifically

because as I've written about before, time management goes through big evolution. So post-computers, computer networks, and email time management went through a big revolution. and David Allen was there at the beginning. He had this idea of full capture where he said all of your task to be in a trusted system that you review regularly, not in your head. He actually adapted that idea from a previous business thinker named Dean Acheson

unrelated to President Truman, Secretary of State, same name, different person, who had first developed, I believe, in the 1970s, this notion of full capture and David Allen expanded it. So that's really the core of this. And David Allen's articulation of full capture said, don't waste mental energy remembering things. Have it in a system so your brain can be clear to actually focus on working.

This also reduces a lot of stress because your brain gets stressed when it's worried about forgetting things you need to do. I generalize capture, though, beyond what Allen talks about. In addition to each of your commitments being somewhere you trust, I want your plans to also be somewhere your trust. So any thinking you've done about what you're working on on all sorts of different timescales, that should be written down somewhere you trust and review regularly as well. I think that's often overlooked, but the planning process of what's going on, how do I want to get my work done, what needs to be done this semester,

what do I have to get done this week to hit this goal, that's a really important part of time management. I don't want that all in your head. That also gets captured. All right. property, configure. This is a twist that I've become increasingly a loud advocate for, which is care more about how you actually organize this information that you're capturing.

I think you really need to think through once I have this information written down somewhere, where do I put it? How do I organize it? Is it in categories? Is it broken up by role? equally important getting the relevant information consolidated. I'm really big on this. So not only do you have a really smart organization for all the stuff on your plate,

you're also gathering in one place all the relevant information. You're not searching through your email inbox to try to remember what does this mean and where are we and what do I owe this person? I'm supposed to get back to Derek about the program codes. What does that mean? Let me go through my inbox. Now all that should be in one place. So these are our two goals with organize.

A, that the information is organized well, where what you want to happen here, what you want to have happen here is that you can very quickly get the gestalt of what's on your plate, what's due, what's not, who you're waiting to hear back from, that the information is put aside in such a way that it's not just a list with 100 things. And two, all the relevant information is there. I'm not scrambling around to figure out what I need to know to do this thing. All the information is there. All right. Control, the third property of a good time management system. Control says instead of being reactive in your decisions about what you want to do with your time. And by reactive, I mean just saying, okay, it's 1223 on Friday.

What do I want to do next? I don't know. Let me see what seems relevant. Let me look at my inbox. Let me look at Slack. Maybe I'll look at a to-do list and try to choose something off of it. Control says don't be reactive. Don't wait until you get to the moment to say what should I do next.

Instead, be proactive. Make a plan for your time in advance that makes the most of the time that you actually have available. So you think ahead. You look at the time you have available and you say, what do I want to do with this? I'm planning the whole picture at once. I'm not waiting until the moment to say what happens next. Now, on the podcast, I talk often about doing this control at multiple timescales. You'll hear me talk about multi-scale planning.

This is where that actually applies. And what I recommend is that you should be doing this type of planning on three timescales, quarterly, weekly, daily. So quarterly, you have a plan for what you want to try to get done that quarter. What's important? What are the big projects you're working on? There could even be daily work that you want to really implement. emphasize like, look, I got to get my cold calls up. So every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I spend

the first hour doing cold calls, whatever it is. But you're making this plan for the quarter. Looking ahead at the quarter, is this a busy quarter, not a big quarter? What are the big deadlines this quarter? Is there a huge trade fair halfway through it? That means the first half of the quarter has to be really focused on preparing for that trade fair. You're looking at the whole picture of the quarter and at this pretty big granularity coming up with a plan. Every week, you then look at that. that quarterly plan and produce a plan for the week ahead of you. Now you're doing weekly planning.

And when you're doing weekly planning, what you really want to do is get a sense of what's going to happen which day. And then finally you get down to the daily scale where you say, what am I actually doing during the hours of the day? So in weekly planning, you are looking at what am I going to do the different days of this week? At daily planning, you're saying, here's my day. I have a meeting here, I have a call here, I have two meetings here.

Here's a time that's for you. What do I want to do during that time? So multi-scale planning, I think, is the right way to think about control. You're giving your time a job as opposed to asking in the moment, what should I do next? So I think any good time management system should do, capture, configure, control. Let me talk briefly about my specific instantiation of these properties, what my time management system looks like at the moment. So for capture, there is where I actually store the things I need to do. And I use Trello, which is a task board software system.

So it gives you a visual metaphor for cards on a board arranged vertically in columns. I use Trello to keep track of tasks and commitments. And I use Google Docs to keep track of plans, the plans I have about various things. So Trellos where all my task are. Google Docs are where my plans live. So that's where in multi-scale planning, my quarterly plan lives. That's where other plans live. Jesse and I, for example, have a Google Doc where we have our plans for the podcast, etc.

Trello for tasks, Google Docs, for plans. In addition to the storage systems, you have to have the capture tool. So the tools you use to capture things during the day on the fly that will then get later moved into those storage systems. Now, for me, I use two main ones. I have my time block planner. I am in a lucky situation where I was able to design and publish my own planner. So you can obviously find out more about that at timeblock planner.com. But that planner has for every day a page in which you can capture stuff.

So I capture stuff writing that planner. On my computer, I also have a text file on my desktop. I call it working memory.txt because I think of it as like an expansion of my actual working memory. And I use that when I'm on my computer to capture things, especially when I'm cleaning out my email. I can just type much faster than I can write and I capture all sorts of notes in this document. I work through ideas on the document. It really is like an extension of my working memory. So a lock gets captured in there.

If I'm in a meeting on Zoom, things are popping up. I have to do. I'm writing it probably right there in that working memory.txte. At the end of every day, I do a shutdown. My planner even has a box I checked. It says shutdown complete that indicates I've done my shutdown. As part of that shutdown process, I look through everything in that planner, everything in working memory.txte, and I get it into one of those more stable systems. It goes on the Trello or I update my Google Doc. So those things get pushed back down to zero. They're temporary tools to capture and then they get moved into the more stable systems.

The one addendum I should add there is the calendar. Obviously, some of these things are appointments, so that goes right to the calendar. All right. Configure. I mentioned I use Trello for my task. The way I actually use Trello is I have a separate board for each of my different professional roles. I keep a separate board as a writer, a separate board, for example, as a teacher, which I keep as a separate board as a researcher, etc.

Those are then split up into columns. There's a few standard columns that every one of these boards have. I typically have a column where I put task on there that's called to be processed. It's a pretty complicated thing I need to do, and I don't quite understand all the details of it, but I don't want to keep track of it in my head. but also, you know, it's 5 o'clock and I'm shutting down. I don't have time to spend 20 minutes figuring out what does this mean? Like, what are the actual actions here? So I'll just throw that in the 2B processed column.

I usually have a column on each of these boards for waiting to hear back from. So if I've sent someone a note and I need information from them and that information is critical for me to keep making progress, I like to put a card on my Trello board under waiting to hear back. It says, here's what I'm waiting to hear back from. and here's what I'm going to do once I get that information. I don't want to remember that in my head. So I put it on there. I typically have a column for things I'm working on this week.

And I'll typically have a column for if there's specifically persistent initiatives within that role, I'll give it its own column. So I can really quickly see for this thing I'm working on what are all the different things that need to be done. So as a researcher, there might be a column for a paper we're preparing for publication. In my administrative role at Georgetown, there might be a column for a search committee that I'm on. Here's the relevant tasks. The time that I really get into and clean this up and look at it and move things around

and check in on it is when I do my weekly plan. So once a week, as part of my commitment to configure, I really go through these systems and I update it. Once a week when I'm building my weekly plan is also when I'm reviewing the Google Docs that capture these other types of plans that are going on and update them and remind myself what's on them. So the weekly scale is when I'm really getting my hands dirty. Throughout the week, I'm just throwing stuff into here at the end of each day.

But each week I really go in and clean things up. All right. Finally is control. I already talked about multi-scale planning. I think it's the best way to do control. You could do it other ways. But I do, for me, it's semester instead of quarterly. But semester weekly daily planning.

Semester plans in a Google Doc weekly plan. I actually type it up in a text document. and print it out. And I keep it with me in the back of my time block planner. So that's how, and I'll update it and reprint it as I need to throughout the week. And then for my daily plan, I'm time blocking like I talked about. Here's my day. Let me block off everything on my calendar.

Here's the time that remains. What do I want to do during that time? Well, let me look at my weekly plan to remind myself of what my big picture plan is for this day. And then I'm blocking off actual hours of time and saying, here's what I'm doing here. Here's what I'm doing there. And I fill in all that information. I do that right in my time block planner, but you can do this in any type of notebook.

There's a whole video at my site, time block planner.com, that walks through the details of how time blocking works. So that is how I do the daily piece. You put those all together. There's my commitment to control. All right, so stepping back,

capture, configure control. You do those three things. You're going to be making smart decisions about what you want to be doing with your time professionally. Now, I know people get concerned. They say, well, I might be injecting too much structure into my life, and this is going to make my work life more rigid and I'll be less creative. I call nonsense than all of that.

Just because you're in control of everything doesn't mean you need to schedule every seven minutes of your time like a crazy person. I mean, you can, when you're in control of your time, you can now start to make decisions like Thursday afternoon, starting at 12, I want to do no work. I'm going to go to the woods and just think about this problem I'm working on. When you're doing capture, configure, control, you could do that with confidence because you know what's on your plate. You've cleared out that time. You know things aren't being forgotten. You made sure that you had time on Wednesday to catch up on things. People need to hear about Thursday.

Because you're in control, you can aim that control at more breaks, more free time, more creativity, less stress. You can significantly, like a lot of my listeners do, reduce the amount of time it takes for you to get your normal work. workload done. And because you're in complete control of things, move it into certain days and keep whole days free to basically do phantom part-time jobs. There's a lot you can do that makes your life more interesting and creative and less stressful once you have an intentional way of making these decisions about what do I want to do next with my time. All right. Now, I promised you a bonus property that arguably has to do with time management. Arguably it's something different.

I'll just mention it briefly. And that is constrain. So circling this whole idea is how you figure out what gets on your plate to be managed in the first place and how you actually manage that work. Now, I'm just going to plant the seed here because this is a bigger conversation. But we need to be very careful about how we decide what we say yes to and what we say no to. We would really like to avoid the situation where we have so much work on our plate that, yeah, we can control it and be organized. about it, but we still don't have enough time to get it done. We want to avoid that situation.

So having clear rules in place about how do I decide what I let on my plate, that's really important. Processes is the second thing that I think is really important when it comes to constraining. You know, figuring out how do I want to do this work? The stuff I let on my plate, can I put a process in place that will reduce the footprint this has on my schedule? There's a lot of different things this can mean. And again, because we're just seed planting here,

I'm just going to very briefly skim the surface, but there may be automation you're doing here. You know what? We have to produce this same client report every week. I don't want to just send emails back and forth and kind of figure it out at the last minute. Here is our process for doing it. And you figure out a whole process.

That's the same thing. The same things happen at the same times every week. You can rely on it. You've taken that burden off of your planning system to have to figure out from scratch. For small questions and back and forth, you might push that all towards office hours. Three days a week for one hour, well publicized, I'm in my office, Zoom is on.

Come to that office hours if you have a small question for me. Come to that office hours if there's a little bit of information you need. Come to that office hours if there's something we can figure out in two minutes of back and forth. And when people bother you with an email or Slack, like, hey, what are we doing again about this? Or can explain to me again what this thing means to say, yeah, come to my office hours. these type of processes are all about reducing what it is that you actually do have to manage with your capture configure control system.

You want to simplify that, simplify what's on your plate, simplify how the things are on your plate are executed. The easier you can make the planning version of yourself's job, the better you're going to do at your actual job. All right, so let me summarize it there. That is my thinking on this core idea of time management.

All right. That's a lot. It's a lot on time management there, Jesse. Do you do capture configure control? Have I converted you yet to my full philosophy? I was a fan when you first started your podcast, so I started implementing all that. I actually do have a question, though.

So what's the latest you ever put together your weekly plan? Monday morning. Yeah. And sometimes, actually, let me be honest. Sometimes, so I often do it on Mondays. sometimes I don't, like I'll have meetings right off the bat on Monday or something like this. And in those days, it'll actually get done later on Monday. But basically, I want to have my weekly plan done before I get to any non-spoken-for time in that week.

So if I know I have a meeting from 9 to 11, that's fine. But if at 12, I don't have something scheduled, I don't want to make a decision about that without a weekly plan to reference. And so I'll do that. And it takes a long time, I should say, for me, because I have 17 jobs, it can take me one to two hours to do my weekly plan. And some people think that's crazy. They're like, that's two hours you could be getting worked on. I'm like, I'm telling you, man, if I do a good weekly plan and I spend two hours doing that weekly plan, I'm going to get two X more done in the time that follows. So I will trade two hours for two X factor increase on what I get done. So it's worth it, man. Do you ever do it on Sundays? I don't do it on Sundays. I don't do it on Sundays. I got to. I got to. to keep so I'm I'm pretty big on keeping weekends clear I got to recharge so we we don't work on Shabbat I don't work on Saturday Sunday's all right I'll write on Sundays Sunday mornings. It's a long tradition I have but I do not want to do email on Sundays if I can all avoid it. I don't want to be I don't want to move my brain into the okay we're turned on for work mindset. So I can go and write without having to completely go into the context of I got this meeting

and this person needs this and this is due. And so that's just part of my fixed schedule productivity notion, which we should do a core ideas video on. But fix the time you want to work, work backwards from that to say, what do I have to do to make that fit? And part of that's getting more productive. And then after that doesn't work,

it's just reducing what's on your plate. And so for me, I keep weekends clear. I mean, I have enough work stress. Yeah. That's also be working on weekends. All right, let's do some questions. Let's do some questions. This podcast is sponsored by Ladder.

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don't want sweet things in the morning, so I eat eggs every day. This is why I am thrilled to have an alternative in just egg that I can work into my rotation and give those poor chickens and my health a breather. So happy New Year, everyone, may be filled with just egg. Just egg, really good eggs. We will start here as always with some questions about deep work, coffee up. All right. So our first question comes from Alessandro. Alessandro asks, what does deliberate practice look like for computer programming? And he goes on to clarify that he finished a master's in applied math. He has a junior software developer job.

And he wants to get better fast. All right. So we talk about deliberate practice all the time. Quick primer is the best framework we have for understanding how people get. get better at complex skills, be them physical or intellectual. It requires stretch. So activity is designed to stretch you past your current comfort point. If you're not stretching, you're not going to improve.

And then two, it requires feedback. Feedback so that you know that whatever you're doing here, the stretch activity you're doing, that you're doing it right, right, that you're doing it right and you're doing it well because underneath the hood that is our skull, you're really trying to isolate the relevant neural circuit and fire it as cleanly as possible because what fires together wires together. So you're going to get more myelination on those circuit connections if you isolate it. So what you want to be doing is really focusing on doing the thing you want to do better.

So you feedback to make sure that you're doing it right. All right. So how do you get that in computer programming? Write real code. Right. Be doing the thing you want to get better at. to be writing real code. The feedback is really clear in computer programming.

A, does it compile, and B, if it compiles, does it do the thing it's supposed to do? You're constantly getting that feedback. Rookie mistake we see in the computer science curriculum all the time. I don't really teach programming courses because I'm a theoretician, but I hear this from the professors that do teach the skill of programming to computer scientists, is that rookie computer programmers often do too much before they test. Like in some sense they say, okay, I'm going to just try to make this whole thing work and see if it works. More adept programmers, what they're going to do is test at the level of their uncertainty.

So at the very smallest granularity at which I'm not quite sure. I'm not 100% sure that what I did is actually going to do this. Then you need to be testing. And testing could be as simple as you have print lines in there. But if you're doing, let's say, some assignment, like I'm going to use a linked list as part of a program to add polynomials. Don't just write the whole program. Does this work?

I gave it a polynomial and another one did to add it properly. You should be with little print statements in there testing everything along the way, especially if you're new. Does my link list work? Let me just make sure and do a little test there. Okay. Is it properly storing all the parts of the polynomial? Let me print everything there.

Okay. Is this ad routine being called properly? So you want to be getting feedback from does a, code compile first of all and two, does it do what I want to do, but that means you have to have this very small granularity, especially if you're new, just a little bit at a time, make sure it works, do the next thing. If you're compiling and praying, like I wrote a bunch of code, it doesn't compile, I'm just going to randomly change a bunch of stuff and try again and see if it compiles.

You're not learning. Incremental. There's a compile that it work. All right. Let me add one more little thing to what I'm doing here, some new print statements. test it? Does it compile? Does it work? That's so you get the feedback. And then finally, to get the stretch, whatever your programming should be hard. There's something you're trying to learn how to do. So you're actually stretching yourself to do that in the program that you're writing. If it's too hard,

then you're out of luck. If you're new to programming and you say, okay, here's my challenge. I want to write my own Minecraft-style Voxel engine. That's too big of a stretch. But if you're kind of new to programming and you say, I'm going to write a look up in a textbook, a sorting algorithm, and I'm going to actually implement that sorting algorithm to see if I can sort this array.

I'm not quite comfortable with looking up algorithms and implementing them. That's like a very good, that's like a very good healthy stretch. All right. So I'm getting the nerd weeds here. But Alessandro hopes that helps write real code, compile and test as your feedback. Make sure that code is hard. You're doing something you didn't know how to do before, but not too hard.

There's actually my kids like, some of my kids like Minecraft. Jesse, there's, you probably don't know Minecraft because you're not a 12-year-old boy. But it has a very complicated graphics engine. It's a voxel engine, blah, blah, blah. there's these YouTube videos my son was showing me where people see how fast they can build it from scratch so they put the, it's like a screenshot of their computer and they cut through time a lot, but they basically build the game

from scratch in a day. Wow. Yeah. Which is, which brings me to my other point, I can't help but think what societal good could they be doing instead with that brain? You see somebody could do that. You're like, I don't know, man. Couldn't you be like working on vaccines or like,

coding up a system to help, you know, people find new jobs. I often, that's often my thought when I see YouTube is like, that's a smart person with a lot of time on their hands and, you know, maybe they should be organizing a food drive at their church or something. And yet we're on YouTube. So rocks, glass houses, things are shattering. All right. Let's keep rolling here. We got a question from Pithicus. Pythicus says, is it rational to quit your job if it implies a potential harm to society?

And some pretty hairy details here. This is actually a structural engineer. Let me see here. Or whatever. He's working, he's supervising a project on building apartment towers. And he thinks there's a problem, a design flaw in the towers that under very rare circumstances could be catastrophic and he's being ignored within his company when he brings this up.

All right. So let me give you a general and a specific response to this issue. In general, in my book, so good they can't ignore you, I talk about disqualifiers for a job. Things that if they are true is a perfectly valid reason to say, I'm going to go to a new job. And the reason why I have those disqualifiers in the book is that a big idea in that, that book is that we're too quick to switch jobs and the quit. We care too much about does this job match my passion?

Do I love the work every day? And it's an unrealistic and naive view of how people actually craft real meaning in their work. And so the book in general discourages very quick job jumping, job switching. But I was like, look, there's some clear disqualifiers. That means you've got to get out of there. And one of those disqualifiers is that the work actively goes against your values. Do not stay in a job if it is actually corroding your own values. If you think there is something that's happening that's illegal, for sure, get out of there.

If you think there's something that's perfectly legal, but is bad for society, you've got to get out of there, right? Because that will corrode at your soul if you're doing work that goes against what you think is important. Now, let's get really specific here. formally registering your complaint all the way up the ladder at the company you really need to do. This is important. If that's not working to formally register that complaint outside the company, you're probably ethically obligated to do that as well, basically some whistleblowing behavior. Now, I mean, I get the hesitation because you're not quite sure that this is an issue.

You're actually not, you know, like the head engineer, but you see this could be an issue and you think they're not paying enough attention to it. There's probably an ethical obligation here to make sure that there. right people who do not have conflicts of interest have all the information you've given them. And if even after all of that, people like, I think it's fine, then maybe this issue is not what you think it is, right? But you do, I think, in your specific case, have an obligation to not just think about whether or not you want to leave this company, but make sure that this issue is something that the right people have seen. So that's not the easiest thing, Pithecis,

but, you know, do the hard thing here. All right, we've got a question now moving on from Luke says, when is deep work not the most important personal metric? All right. He elaborates in the book decoding greatness.

Ron Friedman talks about the importance of tracking your important metrics. He even quotes you. How do I know if hours of deep work is the highest leverage metric for me or something else? Well, it's a good question. I think a useful

a useful bit of terminology when thinking about professional metrics comes from the book the four disciplines of execution 4DX which I talk about briefly in my book deep work and they make a useful distinction which I've heard other people make as well between what they call lead indicators and lag indicators

when it comes to measuring what matters for your work to be more successful lag indicators are the things in the end you actually care about. Right? I mean, this is the thing in the end that you want to actually improve, and it's very specific to the type of work you do. The example in 4DX is a supermarket bakery counter or something like this. And the lag indicator was sale numbers.

In the end, we want sales numbers to go up. If you run a podcast, the lag indicator might be downloads. How many people are listening to the show? or how many in writing, how many people buy my book or in, you know, how much units do we sell of this product? It's the thing you actually care about in the end. Now, what they talk about, and maybe this is what Friedman's talking about too, is just tracking lag indicators is not enough

to actually help you in the moment do the things that matter because it lags. It's not like you can do something today and immediately see its impact on those indicators that matter. And so what they argue is you should have lead indicators, things you can track today. It can influence your behavior today that if you hit good numbers on those,

it will down the line help the lag indicators grow. So in the bakery scenario, you want the sales to go up, but the lead indicator might be something like how many customers did we help or how many different display cases or did we clean? I don't know about bakery, but stuff you can actually do. Deep work is a lead indicator. For a lot of jobs, keeping track of how much deep work am I doing is a useful lead indicator because if deep work is necessary for moving the needle in your job, you need to do it to actually move the needle in your job.

So it is useful. I don't know if I would call it the most important metric, though. I mean, in this case, two other things matter. Hey, do you have your lag indicators right? and are you looking at them? You're just doing deep work for the sake of doing deep work, meaningless.

You've got to know the needle you're trying to move in the end. You've got to be watching that needle to see if it's moving. And that needle is not moving, even though you're doing a lot of deep work, then two, you have to care about what deep work am I doing?

Like, what is the right type of deep work that's going to move the needle on this particular thing that I care about on this particular lag indicator? So don't get too obsessive about just here's my deep work tally. I got six hours this week. week. That's an important tally to do, but only if you know what you're doing during those deep work hours and it's tied to a very specific longer term goal that you're keeping a very careful eye on.

All right. So let's do another question here. We got one from Jeffrey. Jeffrey says, should I stay at a job where the management actively tries to stifle productivity? Context is important here. Looking at the elaboration, Jesse or Jeffrey, not Jesse. Jeffrey has been at this job for eight years. That would be funny if this was a question from Jesse. And it was Jesse being like, how do I get out of a position where my manager is so unproductive and makes me unproductive? And it was just like a passive aggressive way of getting back at me. And it turns out like I'm a terrible boss that's like really chaotic and disorganized.

All right, Jeffrey. You've worked there for eight years. They manipulate, your managers manipulate your workloads by assigning them at random times that are very disadvantageous like Friday afternoons or afternoons before I leave to take the day off. It's good paying benefits, but he's getting frustrated because it's our fault. I mean, we have been infecting poor Jeffrey here with visions of how knowledge work can actually unfold. ways that's not overloaded, ways that's not stressful, ways in which you are in control of your time, and you're moving the needle and getting things done, but on your own terms, you're not overworked, and you're not overstressed.

And he's learned that's all possible, and he turns around, and his boss is like, I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday. We're in Lumberg territory, an office space reference. All right, what do we do about this? Jeffrey, here's what I'm going to suggest. don't leave your job right away, but I'm going to make you more rigid. I'll explain how in a second.

If that blows up, if the Lumberg in your life says, no way, I said I need this tomorrow, get it done, then you start looking somewhere else and you can be confident that it was a good thing to do. So here's what I mean by getting more rigid. Get your systems in place,

you know, and enforce them. Enforce them. So, like, in this case, you need a system, and this is something I've been working on recently in some of my thinking that I haven't published a lot yet. So I'm giving you some ideas that are hot off the presses. I'm a big believer in this external work system approach where instead of just in knowledge work,

thinking about all things that need to be done is existing on individual people's plates. we just throw these around on the people's plates. Jeffrey, do this. Now it's on your plate. And I'll have to worry about it. You know, hey, Jesse, you do this. Now it's on your plate.

I don't have to worry about it. I'm a big believer in having an external system into which work that needs to get done goes. And that people then pull work out of that external system as they have the appropriate time to do it. I think this is actually probably the right structure for work assignment in most knowledge work scenarios. a good external system has a few things to it.

One, a good filter. So it's really clear. Like, here's a different type of work that could come into this system and it has to go through these properly shaped portals. And if your work doesn't fit, then it doesn't go in. So you're making the person assigning the work do more work. Two, there's a real organizational ethic inside of the system, how the work gets organized and prioritized. That's thoughtful. And three, status is really clear to anyone who cares.

All right, this thing I put into the external system, it's been organized. No one's working on it yet. but it has, you know, it's relatively high on a priority list. Probably someone will get to it in the next two weeks. I think in the end, that's what most knowledge work organizations need. Now, Jeffrey, they're not going to do this. So I want you to simulate this with yourself. I want you to basically imagine that you have an external system you can control

where work comes in through these holes. It gets organized. If it doesn't fit, then it can't come in. And clear status is given to the people who care about it. And then there's what you're actually working on this week. weekend this day and you work on a reasonable amount of stuff till it's done and then you pull more stuff out of this system. And how do you simulate something like this?

I mean, I'm still working out the details, but a few different things. So how do you simulate that clear filter on what comes in? Well, someone puts something on your plate that is half baked and they don't give you all the information and they're just plain obligation hot potato and just trying to get it off their plate because it's on their head and they don't want to be on their head. You say something like, all right, I'm happy to take this on board. this is the information I'll need, right? That's back to them.

So they'll have to give you and get you that information. If you really want to push it here, you can involve processes here. You can say, I'm happy to take this on board. There's a bunch of questions that would need to be resolved for me to really understand what you need here. Please, you know, I have these clear office hours. So whenever it's convenient for you, they just jump on one of these, here they are, and I'll get from you all the information I need.

Or here's my calendar, take a 30-minute slot, and that's where I'll get all the information I need, right? So now you are having these carefully shaped to portholes in which information can come in, that if it doesn't have everything you need, it's not coming in the system. None of this like, hey, Jeffrey, can you see what we need to get this,

client's, you know, reimbursement up to date or something. Like, no, no, no, no. Let's figure out exactly what that means. And you can use processes and systems there. Two, okay, once they're in the system, make it status really clear to people. All right, I've taken this into my queue. I'm looking at my queue now and, you know, there's like three or four things ahead of this. So my best guess is probably it'll be a week from now before I can, you know, I can

get to it without changing priorities on the queue. Now, this means you've got to have your, you got to have this information really well put together. You got to have, you know, keeping track of everything, what I'm working on. I mean, you've got to have your act together, Jeffrey, if you're going to pull this off. But you're giving them that good status update. And then from an organizational perspective, you're keeping it really clear, all the things, all the information, their status. Use a trellaboard for this. Like, here's the stuff that I have all the information.

Here's the stuff I'm waiting to hear back on. Here's the relative priority. And you've got to be very careful in your weekly and daily planning to be pulled. pulling things from this list and actually getting the things done and being reliable, they can depend on you. You can get idiosyncrasicredicredicreds, that's the term. It's an Adam Grant term. You can get those credits, the ability to do things weird if you actually deliver. If you don't deliver, that you get no leeway.

And then actually, there it is, the stuff's in my system. I pull out what's reasonable for the week. They don't have the option anymore. of saying it's Friday afternoon and get this done, you know, by Saturday morning. And if they want to push back, they can push back, but they have to push back on your system. And they have to say, I don't want to have to give you that information.

If they say, no, I want this, whatever, you're like, okay, but let me just tell you, these are the things that have to get moved to lower priority, right? They have to confront how much time you actually have available. One of two things will happen. One, they will say, Jeffrey's great. He's been here eight years. He delivers. He's awesome.

We don't want to lose them. I really just wanted clarity anyways, right? I mean, I, and here I'm simulating the boss. I'm really disorganized. I hate having things in my head. I throw things on your plate as soon as I think about them because I don't want to have to worry about them. So long as I know I can trust you, oh, it's in your system. You have the information.

It's going to happen in two weeks and fine. I don't have to think about it. You do you. Or they say, no. No, no, no. Like, forget that. you need to just respond to me and do everything right when I say it.

And then, Jeffrey, you have the information you need that is time to find a different position. It might be quitting that job. It might be changing your position within that company so that you're much more independent where you're trading performance for a performance for freedom.

All right, I'm going to be more like a consultant. Pay me by my performance, but you can't bother me. Whatever you need to do. But give that a try. Give the external system a try. You might be surprised how much they'll put up with. All right.

Let's see here. We've got time for one more question. Let me do one more quick, deep work question. This one comes from Sammy. Sammy says, What are your tips for a mother of two small kids doing masters? Well, I mean, first of all, the fact that you have two small kids doing master's degrees

tells me that you've got some pretty amazing genes. So congratulations. I was trying to explain to my oldest son, who's nine, the plot of Dugiehouser in, which was a show that was popular when Jesse and I were kids. It did not compute. Wait a second.

There's so many questions. And you know what? It didn't compute not because he couldn't understand it, but because there are a lot of questions about Dugiehauser MD and the fact that this 12-year-old was being licensed to do practice clinical medicine and emergency rooms. There's a lot of questions about that show. But that's what I think about when I think about two small kids doing master's degrees.

there was, Jesse, there was at, I don't mean to go on the side, but MIT had some of this stuff going on, right? Like MIT's CS program gets some pretty interesting weird brains, but there was a kid when I started my PhD program. He was another incoming computer science student. And he was 14, maybe, 15 maybe, maybe, maybe 16, but I think like 15 years old. he had not only finished his undergraduate degree in computer science from University of Washington, which is a great program, he had gone and worked at Microsoft for a while and was bored. It was like,

I'm going to go get a Ph.D. So he had been in the workforce for a while before he came back to get his PhD, and he was like 15 years old. So it was a strange place. Did you talk to him a lot? He was a systems guy, so I didn't know him well, and I don't think he actually stayed for his PhD. The problem with PhD programs like in MIT is the entire time you're there.

There's like literally people, not literally, okay, the opposite of literally, but there's people knocking at your doors with wheelbarrels full of money. In reality, it's emails from headhunters, etc. But basically, here is a wheelbarrel full of money if you follow me to a job. And they pick a lot of people off, you know. Like you'll just get things from headhunters. Like we will, starting salary, $450,000, you know, let's rock and roll, come to my quant fund or whatever. So you lose a lot of people, they'll get their masters along the way and then they're out the door. So it's only a suckers that actually stick it out all the way and become low paid professors.

All right, Sammy, I'm sorry. I'm completely off your question now. All right, I was making fun of your ambiguous wording. Sorry about that. So let's go. Let's start this again. Sammy says, what are your tips for a mother of two small kids doing masters? All right.

It's a, what is that? Like a dangling modifier. It's the mother, not the children's doing the masters. All right, we get that. How can she find focus time in the midst of being a wife and a mother? That's good ages. Nine year old and a three year old. I have one of each and a seven year old in between.

So I empathize. Sammy, two things. One, acknowledge like it's a really hard thing you want to do right now. now. So it's important that you don't come into this with the psychology of, oh, I should just be able to do this. No big deal. You know, let's just like rock and roll. I bought a bullet journal. We're good. You know, like, let's just go after it. I read Lean In. That's really hard. If you're, those are hard ages. The nine-year-old is probably in school, but the three-year-old might not be. So that's hard, acknowledge that. Think about it like you told people. I'm going to going to run a marathon. We're like, oh, that's so hard. And you're like, that's how you think about it. Don't think about this as an easy thing to do.

It's not. I don't want you to feel bad about this being hard. Two, in those situations, you need to autopilot all the work. And by autopilot, this is my, my terminology. This goes way back to the early days of my writing on my website for students. But autopilot schedules was where all of the work that needs to be done, you figure out in advance. This is where it always gets done when it always gets done. You can't in this situation succeed by just saying, oh, what's due tomorrow?

Oh, I got to do some readings and write a paper. Let me go get that work done. That barely works for 19-year-olds who are living in a dorm and only doing school. It's not going to work for a mother of two children. So you've got to just figure out, like, this is when my reading gets done. All right, I drop the three-year-old off at daycare and I have this two-hour window, and that's always when I do my reading for the English class. And Sunday afternoons is for paper writing.

so every other Sunday I work on papers. Like you really got to not be thinking at all about what should I be doing today. Autopilot that all out. Figure out how much time you need, what work you have to do when it gets done. So you can be really optimal about this and really be smart about where you try to fit that time. If it still doesn't fit, which it might not, then you have to slow down. You have to slow down the program. You have to find a way to do it on a longer timeline.

Face the productivity dragon. But if the dragon is too big, don't charge into the cave. That's a great thing about autopilot scheduling is you get to stare it in the face and say, can I make this work? And if you can, this autopilot schedule is going to give you the best possible chance of making it work. And if you can't, you say, okay, what can I make work? And you adjust what you're doing until it fits. All right, I think that's good for questions on deep work.

I'm looking at our time now. Running long. That's okay. Let's do a few questions on the deep life. This podcast is sponsored by New Relic. And if you're a software engineer, you've been there. It's 9 p.m. You're finally unwinding after your shutdown ritual has been completed when your phone

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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. Cynard is an app that you run on your computer that has. 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. dot app and use the promo code deep questions, one word, you will get a free month free of the centered premium service. That's centered. And use the promo code deep questions to get a free month of centered. All right, we got a question from Sarah. We have another parent question.

Sarah says, do you view raising children? as something that can be part of the deep life or something that is mostly an obstacle to the deep life, though valuable in a different way. So Sarah, when I think about the deep life, as you know from the show,

I often think it's useful to break up the aspects of your life in the different areas that for historical reasons on this show we call buckets, even though that might not be the best terminology. And what you really want to make sure is that in each of these buckets, each of these areas that's important, you're putting energy, real energy into things that are really important, things that are really important in that bucket and not wasting too much energy on things that are not.

One of those buckets that's probably, I would say, the most important bucket is what I often call community, but community is family friends and the people around you. That's the key one. I mean, I've said this before on the show. If you neglect that one, the other ones don't matter. You might be okay for a while neglecting what's in that community bucket, neglecting family, neglecting the people around you, but you have no resilience. And you're going to hit when you hit hard times, that bottom is going to fall and you are going to plummet. Homo sapiens are very social beings sacrificing on behalf, time and energy on behalf of others that are important to us is that the absolute foundation to, to living a deep life.

So no, it's not an obstacle to a deep life. It's bucket you have to take care of first before you think about the craft bucket, for example, where your work might be. Or before you think about the constitution bucket, where exercise and fitness and health might be, for example. Now, the reason why I think this is an important question is you know that. So I think the issue is there's a semantic thing we should clarify. So when you say valuable in a different way, I think what's happening here is that you are defining the deep life too narrowly. You're probably thinking of the deep life as meaning I do deep work in my job. And so a deep life does a lot of that.

And anything else that gets in the way of that is an obstacle to that. That is not the deep life. And this is why I actually introduced the notion of the deep life, which I coined the term in March of 2020. The historians among you will look at your calendars and realize there were some important things happening during that month. And the whole point of actually coining the term the deep life and starting that thinking in March of 2020 was to make sure that we were considering the whole picture of what matters in life. That was a time period, at least that month, where people did not care much about exactly how much deep work they were doing on their life. job. Right?

Because if you're in the type of job that you do deep work, what you really were doing was being on Zoom all day and just panicking. So it was a time period where we said, okay, the whole life matters. This disruption makes that clear. If you do not have all of the buckets firing, what happens when there's huge disruption, your bottom falls out. You plummet. We don't want that to happen again.

All parts of the deep life matters. So no, your kids are critical to it. my whole professional life is built in part around making sure that that bucket of my deep life is serviced. It's why, I mean, I do the work I do. It's why I really prioritize, and I built my entire career trajectory around this, autonomy and flexibility, control over my time. I want to be on the short scale. I want to be able to, though I can't do it every day, have days where I'm just taking a whole afternoon off. and, you know, I pick the kids up and spend time with them.

I want to be able to take them to their practices. On the bigger scale, I want to take summers really quietly. I want to just be around. I want to have long breaks. You know, the academic life gives you long breaks. The writing life gives you full autonomy, right? I mean, I'm really big on having huge flexibility and seasonality, busy periods and not busy periods.

So I can be around and deeply ingraded my kids' life. We decided where we moved. We're in Tacoma Park because of family is the right place to raise a family, etc. So Sarah, that's all to say, no, your kids are key to your definition of the deep life. But you got to look at all the buckets and then come up with the configuration of life that serves all of them. All right, good question. We've got a question here from Coach Pete. Coach Pete says, is listening to audiobooks just as beneficial as reading actual hard copy books?

Yeah, just read a lot, read a wide variety, use a lot of format. it's all good. It's all good. I just think reading is calisthenics for your brain. It opens up your brain. It's also the source of raw ideas and vocabulary and even argument structure. It is the grist that you then chew up in your brain to make that brain way more effective. So I just say read as much as you can and don't sweat the details.

This is why you'll see, for example, when I do my monthly report on the books I read, that, you know, I'm all over the place. A huge variety of different topics. And I don't care. I just let's go. Let's read. You know, let's just have it going. And I think it's the same thing as if you want to just be generally in shape,

do a bunch of different things. Like I row. I lift weights. I do calisthenics. I do some crossfit. I'm playing on an ultimate frisbee team. You just throw a bunch of stuff at it. It's good for you.

All right. We've got a question here from Jacob. Jacob asks, how do I realistically accomplish a digital detox? when all of my leisure is currently spent on technology. I am currently an online student and I spend all of my vast amounts of leisure time on my phone. I really want to do a digital detox, but I believe it might be too drastic and unsustainable. So Jacob, read my book Digital Minimalism, where I really walk through how to do this.

Two points here. One, I do not use the terminology, digital detox. that term has been appropriated by people in the digital space in what I believe to be an inappropriate way. They took this term that's most heavily used in substance abuse and they completely changed it to be the opposite of its original use, its original intention, so I don't like it. So if you look in the substance abuse community, what is a detox? Well, you're literally trying to eliminate the chemical dependence on the substance and doing it under a controlled circumstance. So you're at a detox center. So there is no alcohol there.

And there's people there who can watch to make sure that from a health perspective that you're okay. So that's part of it. But the second part of it is the part that makes the whole thing make sense is that you also then re-engineer your life during this process so that when you come out of it. of it, you no longer have that relationship with the substance that caused a problem in the first place. You would not run a very successful, let's say, alcohol detox center. If you say, here's our plan. You come here and you spend the month.

It's really hard. You get the DTs, you know, trying to get off your alcohol dependency, you white knuckle it. We get you off of it. And then on day 31, we all go to the bar to celebrate you doing it. You don't know, no, you build a whole life without alcohol. And yet in the digital community, they, they're going to do it. have taken this term and they apply it to mean exactly that. Like, yeah, let's take a break from these technologies that we feel like are ruining our lives

before going back to using them as before. That is the opposite of the intention of a detox. So I do not like that term. So I introduced a new term in my book, declutter, digital declutter. And you spend 30 days away from all these optional technologies with the goal of completely rebuilding your digital life from scratch when you're done so that it's, is something that is sustainable and a source of good, not bad. So no detox, the clutter.

Read the book and I walk through how to actually do it. The key thing you're going to see is that if this is going to work, you have to aggressively fill the newly free time with experimentation and reflection. You have to actually go do lots of other activities, learn new things, try new things. You have to join things and go places. You have to spend a lot of time alone with your own thoughts and reading. Active, active, active. That is the key, Jacob, is you replace what you're doing before with things that are better.

You get much more insight about what matters to you, what you find important, what real pleasure feels like versus superficial dopamine hacking that these devices are doing. And then when you're done with those 30 days, you rebuild your life from scratch. Read digital minimalism. Chapter 3, I believe, will walk you through exactly how to do it. And I got to say, Jacob, you need to do it. You are spending, and I'm quoting you, vast amounts of leisure time on your phone, that is a simulacrum of a real life. You, my friend, are in the matrix, but if they were running the matrix off a kind of sucky computer, you're in like an Apple 2E matrix where it's not only, it's like a simulation of life, but a pretty bad simulation, pretty impoverished simulation of life. You don't even know the feelings of deeper satisfaction you could be experiencing.

You don't even know the sense of competency and awe and gratitude that you could be feeling. You don't even know what's possible professionally with building skills and crafts and seeing your intentions in your brain be made manifest concretely in the world, the quiet satisfactions that provide, the non-trivial sacrificing of time and attention on behalf of people that you really care about. There is a depth and a resilience that is possible in life that makes life not only worth living, but allows you to go through the ups and the downs with your head held high and still. doing good in the world. All of that is possible once you stop spending your vast amount and least your time just looking at your phone. You are clocking in right now into a factory, my friend, a factory that is being run by a small number of social media companies and you're

doing long shifts producing stuff for them that's valuable for them and you're doing it for free and you're doing it at the sacrifice of the stuff that really matters in your life. Quit that virtual job in the Instagram factory and let's build a deeper life. And this podcast will help you do it. Look at my episodes of about the deep life. Keep listening, but I want you to get better. All right,

we got time here for, we'll do two more quick deep life questions. So we have one here from Charles. Charles says, how can high school students excel in this new age without SATs? Well, Ben, focus on your grades. I mean,

the academic formula has always been grades plus SAT scores. For the vast majority of colleges, basically the only thing that matters is your grades and SAT scores. If they're where they need to be, you get in. If they're not, you don't. So now you're just doing grades

instead of grades plus SAT scores. If you're in one of the very narrow group of people who's applying to a college that is selective enough that grades alone are not going to be enough to determine if you get in

and they're going to look at other aspects of your life and your activities, read my book, how to become a high school superstar. I get into how to do that game sustainably. How to make yourself impressive to college admission.

officers without living a over, overworked, miserable grind life. It's a cool book. I profile a bunch of students I call relaxed superstars who got in the good schools without stressing out and I deconstruct how they do it. So you'll like that book. But again, for the most part, for 95%

of the people, get good grades. All right, final question here comes from Helen. Helen says, can you talk about the dangers of social media in two particular context. Stockers and people who put their jobs at risk by silly things they post. Both of these are real issues. Helen, these are good. I'm glad you brought these up.

There's lots of issues that come with having a kind of constant interactive interaction with basically the entire world in a wide-scale platform with a homogenized interface. So everyone just looks the same to everyone else. Yeah, stockers are a big deal. You get weird. Sometimes it's just trolls, but sometimes it could be more scary than that. Tim Ferriss have talked about this. Tim Ferriss has huge issues with this.

People find him. They look up his address and real estate records. They crazy people get obsessed with them. But yeah, there's a cost to putting yourself out there. Now, Tim Ferriss is very famous. But why expose yourself to those costs, you know, especially if you don't get the, whatever, the fame and fortune that comes with that fame. Social media just allows you to expose yourself to this type of issues without the reward. and then people who put their jobs at risk.

Yes, it's a big source of stress. It's a big source of stress. You hear these stories because they get captured and amplified and spread of individuals that said the wrong thing. You know, whatever. It was a joke that landed flat or was taken out of context

or they weren't at their best and then their job is gone. Yes, there's a fear of that happening to you, but way more pervasive is the fear. I mean, that could actually happen, but the fear that that could happen is just going to pervade your life if you've decided that I'm going to just post a lot of things

on social media. I do not understand this cultural belief we had. It's something I've really pushed back on a lot. Everyone has to be on these platforms using them. They don't. And most people shouldn't be. Most people should not be on Facebook or Twitter or whatever sharing their thoughts about everything.

I mean, I know it presses some buttons, but people don't care. They're not following you. They don't really care. But you're giving yourself all these stresses by being out there in the public eye. I mean, I'm barely in the public eye, and there's like 80% of it I hate. Why would you want to do this voluntarily? I mean, this video camera makes me a little bit uncomfortable. I'm like somewhat uncomfortable with people knowing what I look like.

I'm an academic writer. I like, you know, books to come out. Now, I thought this was important because this information is important and has to be broken up and whatever. I mean, we've talked about this whole thing. But why bring this upon yourself the stress of weirdos that can now follow me? The stress of what if I say something wrong and I get fired? And again, whether or not that's actually going to happen doesn't matter.

The fear is causing issues in your life. And there's other things, Helen, that you know, you're not mentioning here that can be just as bad. The stress of seeing someone say something negative about you or what you said. We're not wired to handle that. We're wired to take that very seriously because historically when someone is saying, you know, you're terrible, it was someone in our tribe and it meant that we were probably doing something terrible. Now it's just sport on Twitter, but why expose yourself to that?

This cultural idea that if you have to be on social media, it's weird if you're not, I think it's just crazy. I think social media should be a thing that, like, for some people, like, has a very clear use. But it's not a universal. It's not like if you're not on Twitter, it's deciding to ride a horse instead of driving a car or, you know, you don't own a television. I think it should be way more narrow than that.

Most people don't need to be on there. Most people, at least posting on there, most people's life would be significantly less stressful if they weren't for all these type of reasons. There's a lot of negative externalities to interactive social media use. And Helen, you are right to bring this up because it's yet another reason why we should be way more careful about these technologies

and be way more suspicious about the current cultural climate that at least until a minute ago basically made it seem like if you were not on all these platforms sharing your thoughts with the world that somehow there was something wrong about you. Being in the public eye is a weird place to be. It's a fraught place to be. Don't throw yourself into that for no other reason than just people thought it would be cool to have that app. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for this episode. Thanks for watching. Thank you everyone who sent in their questions. If you like what you heard, you will like what

you read in my newsletter at Kelmuport.com. Go subscribe to that. We'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode and until then as always stay deep