Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 17: Delegation Without Email, Fighting Imposter Syndrome, and My Thoughts on Critical Theory | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on delegating without email, effective methods for fighting imposter syndrome, and my take on critical theory (which leads to an impromptu history seminar, which is the price one pays for asking an academic a question about academic theory),  among many other topics.I will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* Effective delegation (hint: don't send an email) [8:09]* Bosses with varied productivity styles [16:25]* Crucial skills for the 21st century [18:54]* The danger of using a pseudonym to evade imposter syndrome [23:34]* How I choose my career [26:23]* Optimal specificity for daily plans [29:40]* Advice for someone new to writing [33:55]QUESTION ROULETTE [35:43]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* My thoughts on smart watches [38:49]* Using "memory palaces" to train your brain (random story alert) [40:56]* Moving tasks out of email, even if annoying [44:52]* The limited use of social media for a non-established writer [46:29]* My thoughts on the Boycott Facebook movement [48:11]DEEP LIFE QUESTION* The secret to my "smooth" answers to questions [50:38]* Getting back on track after a professional failure [54:14]* Sticking with a job you dislike [59:32]* An impromptu history seminar on critical theory [1:05:00]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. 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, the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. So some exciting news. I am recording this episode from my brand new Deep Work HQ. I lease some offices above one of my favorite restaurants in Tacoma Park where I live. The restaurant is called Republic. I am right above it in some offices, and I have taken one of these offices, and in the process of converting it into a studio, in which I can record the Deep Questions podcast, as well as the numerous other types of podcast and radio interviews and online lectures that I also have to do on a regular basis. So I blame COVID for me now having to have a HQ in addition to my house. the key thing about recording is that you have to have quiet.

The key thing about having three kids under the age of eight is that you never have quiet. Now, at least we used to have long swaths of the day where the kids were in school and preschool, but that's not happening right now. In fact, we're homeschooling, our two oldest kids. And it became quickly clear that I probably had to have a space when I needed quiet that did not involve us needing to actually try to keep very young children quiet. So that was the original push that led me to finally bite the bullet and get my own deep work HQ. This is why I may be adding some advertisements to the podcast.

I mentioned this in the Habit Tune Up mini episode that if you are interested in advertising, you can send me a note at interesting at calnewport.com, and I can help put you in touch with the firm that is working with me on the advertisements. Why do I need some advertisements? Well, it's expensive to have offices. So I got to make this somewhat revenue neutral. I will say there is a silver lining to taking on the Deep Work HQ. It has a few other rooms, including a relatively large, not huge, but kind of large conference room type area.

And I'm losing my carefully constructed study. at my house in Tacoma Park, I'm losing it because we're turning into a homeschool. You know, we're bringing in desks, trying to actually make it a space that is not our normal living room space for schooling because, God, we have to have some separation. This can't imagine the kids being able to transition from school

to watching TV after school to eating dinner, all in the same room. That's going to be too much. So we're taking over my study. We're going to convert that into sort of deep work university, you know, for our kids. So I'm going to take all the furniture I have in my study, which I don't want them to ruin. I'm going to move them here to the Deep Work HQ.

And we're going to build, my wife and I are going to build this, I don't know what we would call it, escape room, you know, a child care panic room. I'm not quite sure exactly what we'd call it, but basically we're going to build a living room. And it's going to be a place where when she needs a break, she can go. And I guess when I need a break, I can go. And maybe I'm trying to, I'm really thinking about maybe making it a place where I also do deep work on writing and math proofs. But I'm toying with the rule. No email. Email I do at home.

Like actually having some separation, as long as I have to have these offices, as long as I'm losing my study, as long as we have to build a new study in my deep work HQ. I'm thinking about the psychological experiment here is what if I have a space? Good whiteboards, good writing desk, my big leather chair for sitting in reading where there's never email done there. I'm wondering if that will eventually become a place where my brain gets better and better at thinking, when we're here, we're thinking. I don't know. I think it'll be an interesting experiment, so I might try that out. The only thing I want to mention is a sort of aspirational daydream of mine. That room overlooks the back patio of Republic of the restaurant. And you look over this back patio. It's kind of in an alleyway, like a big,

alleyway. They have like a dozen tables, mainly kind of small. A lot of them are like high top, you know, one or two person tables because, you know, there's not a lot of big parties eating together these days. And they're all spread out, you know, the county where I live in Maryland has pretty strict social distancing guidelines for business. There's not really viral concerns. And on the weekends, at the end of this alleyway, they often have like a guy with a guitar and a microphone, you know, playing live music. I was here the other day with my boys and we were, we were working on trying to do some soundproofing. And I'll add, by the way, I've only just started trying to actually soundproof or sound shape this studio.

So my apologies if I don't have the sound quite right yet. I'm working on it. Right now I just do a bunch of random furniture in here so that it's not an echo chamber. I will also admit that this is the second time I've recorded the first half hour of this episode because I discovered there was a buzz. A little high-pitched buzz in the background. I had to do some troubleshooting. And it turns out it was a bolt with which I was attaching my SM7B to the mic stand

wasn't quite tight enough. And it was shaking just a little bit. And it was picking up on the mic. So I'm learning. But anyways, so I was here with my boys. I was looking at this happy hour going on at Republic. And I had this aspirational daydream. We could do a live show there.

Because they had these tables that are already virally spaced, right? and there's servers that can bring you food and drink, so that's nice. And in the place at the end of the patio where there's a guy with the guitar and the microphone, I could be there with a microphone and a computer recording. And I could take questions from the crowd and on the internet. I don't know. I think it would be really fun and really relieve you, a way to actually sort of get together with people in this time of COVID that is safe.

I just feel like it could be a real weight off the shoulders. Now, look, I don't know when I'm actually going to, or if I, will ever actually try to get this together. I was doing the math with my wife the other day. Between the various roles I'm playing at Georgetown, between teaching, between running the graduate program, between my research and the students and postdocs I'm supervising, and then what I have to do for my writing business, and then what I have to do to help homeschool our kids, I think I have, if I did the math right, six jobs right now. So I don't have a lot of spare bandwidth at the moment, but maybe when we get to the fall and when the TV, the temperature,

I should say in DC falls below its current level, which, and I'm checking my thermometer here, is roughly 1 million degrees. Once we drop below this current conditions, and maybe if I have a little bit more bandwidth, I just think it would be fun. At the very least, it's an aspirational daydream, so it's something we can think about and could make us feel better even if we don't actually get to it. But that's my new goal. Once I get Deep Work HQ going, if we could somehow finagle a COVID-safe live show,

I think it'll be a great coup. So we will keep that dream in mind. Okay, so enough admin. I just was excited about that news that a Deep Work HQ exists. And I'll keep you updated about my various experiments using this space. As always, please subscribe. Please leave a rating review. That really does help spread the word to new listeners.

If you want to ask your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com every four to six weeks. I send out a survey to gather new questions. Feedback can go to interesting at calnewport.com, and that's enough of that. Let's get started with some work questions. Erica asks, how do you utilize delegation to help manage your workload and capacity

to take on new projects and mitigate being too busy? Well, Erica, it's a good question because we haven't talked a lot about delegation, but if you are in a professional circumstance where you are able to delegate. So maybe you have support staff. Maybe you're part of a team and members of the team pass out work to each other. Maybe you manage multiple people and you can delegate to the people you manage. Or maybe you have a horizontal structure, one of these matrix style management structures

where there's different teams that specialize on different types of efforts and you can delegate work to the teams horizontally that specialize in those efforts, whatever it is. If you're in a position where delegation is possible, it is often the key to avoid being completely overwhelmed and burnt out. We don't, however, I think, put enough attention in the knowledge work setting into the right ways to delegate, such that it does help you avoid burnout, but also so that you're not burning out someone else or annoying someone else or leading to essentially a revolt. among those that you're able to delegate to.

So I think the key enemy here to avoid Erica is what I would call inbox-based delegation, where as something comes on your radar that you don't want to deal with or stresses you out that you just shoot off an email. You know, hey, Bob, can you handle this? Hey, Sarah, look into this, right? You just shoot off an email. We've all had people we've worked with like this before

where, let's say you're gone for the afternoon, you're traveling, and you get back, and there's 15 emails from them. And it's almost like it's stream of consciousness, right? Like as things come to their mind, you can see them getting stressed out about it. And can you look into this? What about this? Hey, can you do this?

I'm worried about this. And they're sort of shooting these things out just desperately, desperately trying to get these open loops closed or temporarily off their plate. That's a terrible way to delegate. A, it's still going to require a lot of ambiguous back and forth before the person you're delegating to knows what you're really asking and you're going to annoy them and you're going to burn it out. And you never really trust.

Like, what did I delegate? Are they really doing it? What's the status? I need to bother people. Maybe I need to go back in my inbox and try to find old messages to remember where I am. I mean, none of this is a very efficient approach to organizing work. So what I suggest and said is if you were going to delegate, have clear processes and systems to support the delegation.

So there should be a process in place. Here is how this type of work is delegated. And the answer should not be, I shoot you an email. There needs to be a system. system in place where it is clear who is working on what, what has been delegated, what's its status. Here is all the relevant information, all in one place. You need those two things, process and systems if you want to have successful delegation. To give you a quick example, here's something I do and my role as a director of graduate studies.

I work with a graduate program manager and together we work to manage the graduate program within the computer science department. here at Georgetown. During the busy periods, which is the beginning and end of semesters, we get a lot of email from students with questions. A lot of delegation kind of has to happen, because there's some questions that my graduate program manager just knows the answer to because they're common, and he can answer them right away. Some questions he needs my input on, or it's something I have to do, like maybe it's something I have to sign. And a lot of times we have to delegate temporarily the issue to someone else within the bureaucracy of the university to get an answer on something we don't know.

We've never seen this issue before. So we have to ask someone in the Office of Global Services, okay, how do we deal with this issue? So it's like a temporary delegation. If we did this all in our inbox, it would be chaos. I've tried it that way. It's chaos. The student sends an email.

The GP and forwards it to me. I shoot off a question to, the Office of Global Services, like they send something back, then I have a follow-up question for the student, and then I pass it back off to the GPM with an email, hey, can you handle this? Hey, it's fine if you have one or two of these. But if you have 12 or 15 or 20 such issues open at a time, it doesn't scale. Inefficient delegation using the inbox method. So what do we do instead?

Well, I introduced a ticketing system, just like an IT department uses when you have a problem with your computer, you know? So what happens is when an email comes in, the graduate program manager is on the front line. If he can answer it right away, he just will. I don't need to know about it. If it requires delegation, the email goes into the ticketing system. And that's really easy to do. Actually, we just have an email address set up that only him and I know, and he just forwards the email into the ticketing system. It'll automatically show up in there. We're the only two people who look at this. The students don't know. We don't require them to interact with the ticketing system. It's just for us. Now, once it's in the ticketing system, there's two things you can do.

You can put notes there. You have a record below this email of the current status, what's going on, what we've learned. And there's a status field. And in that status field, you can delegate who currently has responsibility for this email. So if it's something I need to do, the GPM will add a note. Yeah, you're going to have to sign this or I don't really know what to do about this. And then he'll change that field to assign it to me. Now when I go into the ticketing system, as I do a couple times a day, you say, show me everything assigned to me, what's on my plate? And there it is, it pops up. Here's the original email. Here's the notes. Here's why it's assigned to me. Now let's say I need to now send off a note to someone else in the university to get an answer.

I can put a note under it. Okay, here's, I sent off an email to so-and-so in this office because I didn't know the answer to this. I can change the status. waiting to hear. Now we have a whole list here, like, okay, here are open issues that we're waiting to hear back from someone that's outside of the two of us. So now we know, quickly review those and can say, huh, we never heard about this. Let's bother that person again. Right, that's an example of having processes and systems for delegation. It allows us to handle during the busy periods a large number of different requests from students without being completely overwhelmed, without having an unsustainable amount of email

without having a psychologically distressing source of open or quantity of open loops. I've also profiled companies that use tools like Trello or Flow, so virtual task board tools to handle delegation. The nice thing about Flow, like Trello is just cards and columns, but Flow has this assignment feature. So the task on this card that this card represents, you're now responsible for this. if you assign that task to the person, like their picture, a little avatar,

is on the front of that card. So you look at this virtual task board, and you know exactly who is working on what. So it's great for delegation. And of course, you can flip the virtual card over and attach all the relevant files and all the relevant notes and here's what's going on and here's the status. But I've definitely seen savvy companies use these type of tools. So again, you have a process and you have a system.

Their process is typically like a synchronous meeting they do every day. Who's working on what? Look, I'm going to put this on your plate now. They change the status. It's now assigned to you. There's no ambiguity about who's working on what. All the information is right there. Very little email needed.

So it's a long answer to a short question, but it's because it's a topic I think is critical. And I think I don't talk about enough, which is delegation. So, Erica, thank you for that. Everyone else, keep that in mind. Delegation, if available to you. could be crucial for reducing stress and overload, but you need processes, and you need good information systems to make that work. Mary Ann asks how to deal with conflicting work approaches by grad school mentors.

As she elaborates, she is a PhD student who has two different advisor slash mentors that she's working with and they have two different productivity styles. So two different approaches to how they schedule things, how they track information, how they manage their time, etc. And she's like, how do I deal with two different mentors, advisors with two different styles? So my advice, Mariana, is to come up with your own style. So here's how I want our weekly meetings to work. I will send you, for example, a summary one day before each meeting about what happened since the last meeting, what questions I have, what I'm going to need help on.

Maybe we'll agree that if I need questions answered, before the next weekly meeting, I'll use, let's say, the office hours for this particular class you're teaching. Basically, come up with the system you want to use to manage your collaboration with the mentors, and then just tell them. They'll be grateful. Graduate school advisors are not, we're not known to be the most organized people in the world. we have a lot on our plate. If you say, look, I already have a system that's going to work for me,

and now you don't have to worry about what's going on. I think the mentor slash advisor will be happy about that. I've done similar things. When I was a postdoc, I had two different advisors, roughly speaking. I mean, had an official postdoc advisor, but there was another professor who was funded on the same grant that was paying for me. So it's like I had two advisors. And instead of trying to work with each of their individual systems,

I just said, here's what I'm going to do, guys. I used a wiki. Those were big back then. I'm going to put in a report 24 hours before our meeting. All the relevant data and results will be there. Summary of what I'm up to. Summary of what I need help on. In fact, I think I said to one of the two advisors,

you don't even have to show up at the weekly meeting if there's nothing relevant to you on here. Those meetings could often be fast because there wasn't much to discuss some weeks. It was all clear. There wasn't this sense of just I need to talk with you as a way of moving things forward or a way of making sure that work isn't falling through the cracks. I just gave them a system. Here's how I want to manage this, and they were happy that I was willing to do that work for them. And I think your mentors will be the same way, Mariana.

So don't worry about their productivity styles. Worry about yours. And just let them know what you'll be doing. Philippe asks, what are some 21st century skills that every person should know? Well, Philippe, the classical answer I give, the answer that I detail in my book, work is cognitive fitness. So training yourself to be able to concentrate intensely without needing distraction is a skill that is increasingly valuable in an increasingly competitive and complicated knowledge work sector. So I stand by that.

I really do think the ability to focus is itself a very important skill. But let me come up with a few others that I think might also be relevant. Advice I would give to someone, let's say, just entering the knowledge sector right now and wanting to know what should I work on. So I think another skill that's relevant is having your act together. Knowledge work is very autonomous. There's very little supervision over how you actually get your work done, how you actually organize yourself. Now I think that's a problem. I've written about this and I have some more writing coming out about this, but it's the reality right now. And because of that, there is a real value placed on having your act together. And that means two things.

One, you don't drop the ball. If someone gives you something to do, it gets done. They do not have to worry that it's going to fall through the cracks. They're not going to have to prod you and hear the excuse about, oh, yeah, no, sorry, it's been busy. I just didn't get to it. They just trust you. If I email this to you, if I mention it to you in the hallway, if it comes across in a meeting, it's going to get done. You won't drop. the ball. The other part of having your act together is actually delivering things when you say you will. This is huge. If you say, look, I'll get this to you by Monday, actually get it to them by Monday. Don't just add a few days and apologize. Get the thing to people at the time you promised you

would. Now, if you're having a hard time, let's say it's harder than you thought or there's a roadblock, clearly communicate that. I know I said it's going to be Monday. This is slowing me down, so I'm now changing this to Wednesday, and then you deliver on Wednesday. Those two things, they might seem simple, you know, you don't drop the ball, you deliver things when you say you will. But those are critical skills, and they're pretty rare, especially at the entry level in the knowledge sector. If you can do those two things, that will get you through the first five to ten years of your career. And I only get you through the first five or ten years of your career, but actually on a pretty fast trajectory upward. Now, at some point, other types of things are going to come into play,

strategic thinking or managerial ability, etc., etc., but just being someone who has their act together, I don't want to overestimate how important that is and how rare that is. I think that is a key 21st century skill because, again, work is super autonomous right now, and a lot of people because of that are just bad at it. And if you're not bad at the basics of organizing your efforts, organizing what's on your plate, and actually getting things and delivering things, if you can do that, it's a huge skill. We should train everyone to do this, but we don't. So it's a good competitive advantage if you're willing to.

Finally, I would say being comfortable with the disciplined and deliberate pursuit of valuable goals is a very important 21st century skill. So what I mean by that is that you're able to take a hard goal, like I want to learn this statistical toolkit, just to give an example, and you're willing to come back to it again and again and Again, you take six months or a year or two years, you keep your eye on it and you push, push, push until you've gotten really good at the thing. That's the discipline piece. The deliberate piece is that when you're pushing, you're actually deliberately practicing the skill.

You're willing to push yourself past where you're comfortable to get feedback to do the activities that make you better, not the activities that make you feel better. And those are two very distinct things. we tend to want to do the activities that make us feel better or the activities that make us better are often much different and much less pleasant. If you're willing to do this discipline and deliberate pursuit of valuable goals, you will accomplish a lot of valuable goals. You'll pick up skills that are valuable.

You'll deliver things that are really, really good. That is a very valuable skill, again, in the 21st century because there is a lot of autonomy. So that's my suggestions, Philippe, cognitive fitness, getting your productivity act together, getting comfortable with the disciplined and deliberate pursuit of valuable goals. Jessica asks, what do you think of writing and publishing under a pseudonym as a way to get over imposter syndrome? You know, Jessica, I think that is basically obscuring or obfuscating the problem instead of trying to solve it.

Because what does it tell yourself if you say, okay, I'm going to publish under a fake name because, you know, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe someone's going to call me out. I don't want to deal with that. If I'm under a pseudonym, they can't do that. If that's the story you're telling yourself, then you are agreeing with the premise that you are potentially or even probably an imposter.

And so that issue is not going to get better. So I would say do not publish under a pseudonym to get around imposter syndrome. What I would do instead, I think this is much more positive. is look for gatekeeping. And what I mean by gatekeeping is look for places to publish where there is a gate that has to be opened for you. So there is an editor that has to accept your piece. There's a publisher that has to buy your book, as opposed to, let's say, like self-publishing a book or posting your musings on a blog. Now, the reason why I think that's going to help you here is because the gatekeeping,

will help the imposter syndrome. This publisher would not have written the book if I shouldn't be writing it. They know what they're doing. This editor would not accept and publish this article if it wasn't a reasonable article. And that's what's going to help you with your imposter syndrome. So instead of trying to sidestep the imposter syndrome and say, well, why don't I just set up the fences so that when the world does descend on me as an imposter, I won't take all the arrows, they'll be deflected. That's not going to help you.

But if you say instead, if I'm really worried about this, then why don't I get some object feedback on it and that objective feedback for me can be gatekeepers. And if I can get through these gatekeepers, then I don't have to worry so much about being an imposter. And Jessica, it won't take very long, a couple articles, a book before you feel a lot better about it. So that's what I'd recommend. Now, these don't have to be, by the way, incredibly high gates that you have to get past. I don't mean, look, publish in the New Yorker before you trust that your writing is good or sign a big splashy book deal with Random House before you trust that your musings are worth hearing. This could be like an online publication. It could be a small press. It could be whatever.

They don't have to be very hard gates, but gates that are strong enough, they're not going to let an imposter in. They're not going to let bad writing in. They're not going to let in someone who has no business writing. See, Jessica, I don't think any of those terms describe you. So let those gatekeepers help convince you that that's true. And then I think you'll find that imposter syndrome diminishes pretty quickly after that. Alex asks, what made you decide to pursue your career path? Well, Alex, the running joke on this podcast is that every other answer I give begins with, well, I wrote a book about that. And that is kind of true here too, because I did write a book about this.

But the other half of the answers, I tend to start with, oh, I wrote a New York Times op-ed about that. So I'm going to try that second answer here. Back in 2012, I wrote a New York Times op-ed specifically about my career choice, leaving college. Now the premise was I had two related but ultimately pretty distinct career paths ahead of me as I was a senior in college. I had a job offer from Microsoft to go into that route of technology project management and development. And then I had a graduate school offer from MIT. And the point I made in the op-ed is that what I did not do is, is adopt the mindset in which, well, one of these is probably my true passion.

And if I choose the true passion, I'll be happy. But if I choose wrong, then I won't be happy. I rejected that true passion mindset and instead thought, okay, with both of these career paths, what would I be granted if I did them very well? Like, what would the reward be? And when I was looking at Microsoft, it was, you know, it's exciting. Microsoft was really the big company back then. Amazon was small, Google didn't really exist beyond,

I think it was like a year into its existence as an actual company. So Microsoft was the big player. Apple was on its way back up, I think, at that point. And so it would be exciting. It would pay well off the bat. But I looked at grad school and I saw it would give me more autonomy. As I got better, I'd be able to keep doing it. So I could be a grad student for a while and be a professor if I was really good at it.

And I'd have a lot of autonomy. So among other things, I could more easily. right at the same time. Now, I was already working on a book at this point. I wrote my first book predominantly during my senior year of college. And so that autonomy, I valued that more than income in the short term. And I thought that would be something that would be more valuable to have. So I chose grad school and kept writing while a grad student. And I think that did end up working out really well because I did gain autonomy. I was able to deploy that autonomy strategically. I have been able to have a writing career in parallel with my academic career.

The academic work is probably more intellectually stimulating than development or project management work would have been. And ironically, my books are successful enough now that I probably make more money as a professor slash writer than I would have, even if I had worked my way up to ranks pretty aggressively at Microsoft. So that all worked out. But anyways, the key point there, Alex, is that I abandoned the notion of like one is the right job and one is the wrong job.

they're all would have been good jobs. I would have been happy with both. So I was really trying to say, okay, what factors, what career capital will I get out of each of these directions and which of that capital seems more valuable to me? So it was a more nuanced decision than what we typically think about, which is, I'm meant to be this, so I should do it. But that nuance led me to a good place. Duncan asks, when creating a daily plan, how important is it to plan to complete specific deliverables by the end of a time block versus just planning on to work on those deliverable for the duration of the time block. That's a good question, Duncan. This is the type of hardcore productivity question I typically tackle in my habit tune up

mini episodes, but I'm happy to go at it here. So I think what matters when planning out a time block is clarity. So if there's clarity of what the specific action you should be doing is, and what it will look like to be successful, you're going to have more motivation than if it's unclear. So sometimes clarity requires a very specific deliverable. I will produce exactly this during the block. Sometimes however clarity doesn't require that.

So let's use the example that you gave in the elaboration to this question. In your elaboration, you mentioned that you're a developer. And what you're talking about is working on bugs. And when you're working on bugs, you were saying that you have this list, a bug list, and you try to go through them. And you don't know how long they're going to take, right? Like the first bug might take an hour or it might take two minutes.

You don't know until you get there, but it's something you need to keep coming back to is trying to make progress through your bug list. Now, I think that's a great example where you can have real clarity about what action you should be doing. You should be working on the current bug at the top of the list and trying to fix it. And if you finish it and there's time left in the bug block, then you should work on the next bug in the list. Now that's an example of having a lot of clarity. Your mind is never in doubt about what specifically should be working on. Even if you can't figure out in advance what the deliverable will be,

will it be one bug, will it be two bug, will it be four bugs fixed during the time block? It doesn't really matter. You don't know. It's hard to predict, but you have clarity of what you should be doing at any given moment. So that's fine. On the other hand, if you say, you put aside an hour and say, think about business. strategy. Well, that's not specific enough. What does that mean think about business strategy? You're just sitting there? What type of parts of business strategy are thinking about? How are you

recording it? What's your goal here? I think that would be an example of not having a clear enough deliverable. There you'd probably want to have some template maybe for a business plan. And you're like, I want to try to fill in the first few sections, right? A concrete action trying to fill in sections. Or you're trying to learn. So you're like, I want to read this article and this book chapter, whatever it is, right? You would need more clarity there. Just think it's not specific enough. The place where this was a real issue was actually in my student advice writing.

One of the worst, most damage-inflicting verbs in the student lexicon was study. You say, oh, I'm going to go study. What am I doing for the next two hours? I'm studying. And your brain would be like, I don't know what that means. What do you mean study? That's not a concrete verb. You know, it could mean a lot of different things.

If you just say study, you would lose motivation, you'd procrastinate, right? It wasn't specific enough. Where's the deliverables? If you said, no, no, what am I going to do for the next two hours is I'm going to go through the question, evidence, conclusion, note clusters for the first six lectures. And I'm going to do progressive winnowing with active recall on the QEC structures, clusters, for two hours or until I finish that collection. Now, if you don't know what any of that means, that's because, you know, you're not a hardcore Cal Newport student advice fan, but this is all ideas from my book, how to become a straight-A student.

But my point there being, once you got really specific, oh, this is not studying. I'm taking these notes. I'm doing this to them. And this is when I know I'm done. You have a lot more motivation. You have a lot more less procrastination. You're going to be able to get a lot more intensity of focus. So, Duncan, it's a good question.

The answer is clarity about what action I should be doing in any given moment, whether you can predict what the deliverable is that. that that will produce in advance, it's less important than being clear about what you should be doing right now. Ape asks, what advice would you give to someone who's just started writing? Ape, I'd give you the same advice I gave to Jessica earlier about imposter syndrome, which is write for gatekeeping. Submit things to a place where they will be rejected unless they are good. And you can start with a relatively low.

bar, like an online magazine or blog where it's going to filter out just bad writing from reasonable writing. And then once you're consistently getting things accepted there, move up to something that's a little bit more competitive. See, what you want here is feedback, clear feedback on whether your writing is at a certain level or not. And you want to set that level to be a little bit of a stretch from where you currently are. That is how you get deliberate practice in the world of writing.

You work your way up, you work your way up, do this for a while. and suddenly you're in really big magazines or impressive websites, and you're able to write book proposals that you might be able to sell. And you got there by stretching yourself again and again, just like the athlete that keeps raising the weight during their weight training so that their muscles get stronger and stronger. The thing a lot of people do instead, when new to writing, is they will publish where there's no gatekeeping, like on their own blog,

or on social media. That's fine. And you might even pick up a little bit of, familiarity with writing and some skill, but you're not stretching yourself. And if you don't stretch yourself, the pace at which you improve is going to be way too low. So that's what I say, Ape, look for the gatekeepers, use the gatekeepers to your advantage. They're in some sense, like your free riding coach that will make you better a lot faster. All right, let's leave it there for work questions and play a quick round of question roulette. All right, the idea here is simple.

I'm going to load up a question that I have not seen before and will answer it right now on the fly. The question for today's round of question roulette comes from Nevec and it reads as follows. I have multiple large projects with overlapping timelines. How do I go about scheduling both deep and non-deep work to meet my various deadlines? Well Nevec this is where the weekly and quarterly planning discipline comes into play. So let's start at the quarterly level. At the quarterly level, you should have a work plan, and you could write this in longhand, by which I mean just in a text file. There's no particular format or spreadsheet or tool that's going to make this easier.

So just write long form paragraph text and list or whatever you want to do. Forming doesn't matter, but you figure out this is what's going on over the next few months. Like this fall, these are the big projects on my plate, generally what my plan is, and what my plan is for the near future. So it's on here where you can say things like, I have a deadline coming up in a month, and two big projects are unrelated. And maybe I think this week I'm really going to focus on this project and the next week I'm going to focus on that project.

Or here you say, as we get closer to like the deadlines, I want to alternate every other day. Like you're trying to lay out a vision of roughly speaking when the work's going to get done. Then when you do your weekly plan, you look at the quarterly plan and you use the quarterly plan to influence your weekly plan. The weekly plan is where you say, okay, I'm just working on Project A this week, or every morning I'm going to try to make progress for the first two hours on Project A,

and on Tuesday and Thursday I'm going to put a no meeting zone in. Just block out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I'll block it on my calendar like an appointment, protect that, and I'm going to say that's when I'm working on Project B. So your quarterly plan sinks you into roughly what stuff you need to make progress on during the week, and your weekly plan figures out this is how I'm going to do it. Then you get to the daily plan, you're just time blocking based on your weekly plan.

So if you have a sophisticated list of obligations like I do, Nevec and a lot of other people do where you have lots of projects and they're very long term. They have interlocking parts and moving parts. They influence each other and they have different deadlines. You have to be doing this sort of multi-scale planning. You absolutely cannot just show up, load up your inbox, look at your calendar, maybe glance at a task list and say, what do I want to do next? That's amateur hour when it comes to productivity, and it's not, you're not going to be able

to get after it. You're not going to be able to produce multiple impressive projects simultaneously with that type of simplistic productivity thinking. Multi-scale planning is necessary. Quarterly, what's the big picture? Weekly, how am I going to make progress on the big picture this week daily? What do I do with my hours today? You do those things, Nevec, and you're going to be able to get 2x more done than the people around you.

All right, let's move on now to technology questions. Cole asks, how do you feel about a smart watch, especially using cellular and leaving the phone at home? So he's asking about the Apple Watch option where it has a built-in cellular chip, so it doesn't even have to sync to your phone in your pocket. You can actually leave your phone at home. Well, Cole, I think there's two groups of people where I've seen smart watches be useful. One is for athletic training. So there's various types of functionality related to athletic training that makes the smartwatch is useful, not just their ability to track various metrics, but also if you're out there running,

if you're out there rowing, if you're out there swimming, can't really have a phone with you. So a cellular-connected smart watch frees you of that burden. The other people for whom I've seen smart watches be useful are those who, to have some sort of logistical reason they need to keep up with, let's say, like, text messages or calls. Like, you know, I might get a call from my kid's school. There's an issue or I'm out and about running errands. There's going to be some logistics. You know, I'm going to have to organize.

Like, hey, I'm running a little late. Let me meet you at this time or whatever. Right? You're in a situation where you have to do some text-based and phone-based communication, but you have a hard time when you have your phone around not getting lost down rabbit holes. not getting lost on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and losing your ability to be present in the world around you. And so for those people, I think the smartwatch can also be helpful

because you keep the bare-bones communication without the distraction. Now, long-term is probably better just to solve the distraction issue to get to a point where you can have your phone nearby and not have to compulsively check things. That's where something like my book, Digital Minimalism, will walk you through a whole overhaul of your digital life, so that's not an issue anymore, but that's another class of people for whom I've seen smartwatches be useful. Now, if you don't fall into one of those two classes, I would say don't waste your time, don't waste your money.

It's not your job to figure out how Apple's products may be useful. If you don't have a compelling reason, keep that money for something else. Okay, Josh asks, what is your opinion of memory palaces? For those who don't know, memory palaces is a mnemonic technique for memorizing a large amount of, of information. Well, Josh, to go back to my standard answer, I've written about this. In particular, in deep work, my book Deep Work, I have a chapter called Memorize a Deck of Cards. And it goes through the Memory Palace technique. One of the things you do with the Memory Palace technique is you can memorize a shuffled deck of cards. There's memory competitions in which that is one of the challenges.

And I argue in the book that doing something like feats of memorization using things like Memory Palace is like calisthenics for your concentration ability, and it can really sharpen your ability to focus. So it's a good training exercise. Now I gave an example in the book, which I thought was actually quite interesting. I came across this student. He was from Australia. And the short version of his story is that he was having a hard time in the Australian equivalent of high school. to the point where he was diagnosed with maybe you have an attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder because he was having a hard time concentrating and because of that his grades were bad.

It wasn't even clear if he was going to be able to go to college. But where the story takes a twist is that he then, through happenstance, met the Australian memory champion. So someone who actually does competitive memory events, this is a thing. I recommend the book Moonwalking with Einstein if you want to learn more about it, Joshua Foyer. Actually, that book, the title there,

Moonwalking with Einstein is a reference to the Memory Palace mnemonic technique. So that's a great book. It's all about how you learn to stretch your memory. Anyways, the student, he met the memory champion in Australia, and for some reason said that seems cool. And so he began to train.

He trained under the memory champion of Australia. was like a like a nerdy version of the karate kid mr miagi relationship you know with like 90% less kicking and 95% less racism so they he's training under the memory champion and he really gets into it for whatever reason he practices practices practices it gets pretty good he actually places gets a play scene i forgot what it was like third maybe in one of these big australian memory championship events now let's bring bring this back to his work as a student. At this point, his work as a student got much better. His grades got much better. He ended up going to a very good university in Australia and then

accepted into a PhD program to study under really top scholars in Australia in the field of psychology that he wanted to study. Now, my argument was part of what happened here is this otherwise eccentric-seeming training he was doing for these memory championships sharpened his ability to focus. It made him into an expert-level deep worker. He could become very comfortable sustaining his concentration on one thing at a time. And as we know, if you can sustain your concentration intensely at one thing at a time, you can get better work done. You can get it done much quicker.

And so studying as a student is an activity that really benefits from the ability to focus. And so his grades, performance as a student skyrocketed. So I use him as an example for some level of transference when it comes to memory training. If you do one activity that makes you better at focusing, you can reap those rewards in another activity, which is all a long way of saying memory palace pneumonic techniques to help memorize things, you can think of it as a way to make your mind sharper. If it sounds interesting to you, definitely pursue it. Okay, Paul asked the following.

he says, I would love to keep Outlook closed a majority of the day, except for three to four email checks throughout the day. However, I often need to refer to emails for reference purposes. Copy-pasted the email elsewhere doesn't seem efficient. Well, Paul, efficiency is not always the goal. I think you do need to get that information out of Outlooker into another system. Efficiency by itself is not valuable. Production is valuable.

And so it might take you a little bit more time in the moment, moment to take an email when you're doing one of your three checks and to say, what is this actually asking of me? And putting that into a system, like on a Trello board, under an appropriate column where it's captured and its status is clear. That takes a little bit more time. But if that saves you from having to do 13 email checks instead of three, because if you keep having to go back to that inbox to see, oh, what was the information I needed for this project, what was I supposed to work on next. What did that guy say the meeting is? Every time you go back into your inbox, you're going to see more things, you're going to have context shift, you're going to lose your

cognitive capacity. So you're going to end up actually getting a lot less done. That time you lost, the time you lost, taking information on your inbox is going to be lost anyways because of reduced cognitive capacity and overhead and the stress of all those open loops. So I would say get stuff out of outlook, get email into other systems. And if you have so many emails that that's impossible, then you have too much on your plate, and that's a bigger problem to solve. Andrew asks, how can an unestablished fiction writer avoid using social media while building up their author, brand, or platform? Well, I would say, Andrew, if you're an unpublished fiction writer, you are not going to be able to build much of a platform or brand anyways. Useful platforms and brands are built on top of useful output.

people will want to be on your mailing list, people will want to be your social media subscriber, people will want to know what you are up to once you've done things that are worth knowing about you being up to. So I would say I wouldn't spend much energy on that right now at all because I don't think you're going to be able to build up much of a platform or brand right now. This is going to be at all relevant. I mean, you have to produce good things before you get a good amount of people who care what you're up to.

So I would put more energy right now on how do I write a good book? How do I write a great book? I mean, social media could be great for helping people talk about a really great book if it's great, but it can't help you at all if there's nothing for it to talk about. There's no alchemy here. There's no way to alchemize value out of online activity. I mean, all these internet platforms are as a way to make it easier for people who like something, for example, to hear about it and talk about it, but you still have to give them the thing they like about.

Now, I know this is a hard answer because there's some degree publishers want you to have a platform and they want you to have a brand. But if you're just starting out, there's only so much you can actually do. And by far the most important activity is writing something that's so good, it can't be ignored. And so that's where I would put my energy if I was you. Or let's do one more technology question. Jerry asked, what do you think of big companies when they boycott Facebook? I just think Jerry is talking about there is an active boycott Facebook campaign going on. Now, people might assume, given my long-held stance of suspicion about social media, my long-held belief

that people spend too much time using it to their detriment, that I would applaud something like the boycott Facebook movement, but I'm indifferent at best, if not a little bit worried. And the reason I'm worried is that the underlying premise of the boycott Facebook movement is that Facebook is fundamental, that Facebook is so important, it's so at the center of people's lives and of our discourse, that really big action like advertisement boycotts are needed, not to make it go away,

but to fix things about it that the boycotters don't like. But fundamental to any movement to fix aspects of a platform is the assumption that this is a really important platform because why else would major advertisers care? So let's put aside. the specific fixes that the boycott Facebook movement is pushing towards because it's somewhat orthogonal to my point here, which is that it's a movement that is premised, if not motivated, by the assumed importance of Facebook. So the related campaign I like better, and this was from

maybe a couple years ago, was the sort of ironically titled, titled hashtag quit Facebook movement. because here the idea for quit Facebook was look you don't need to be on this thing now they were mad about it for various things happening in facebook relating to political issues but whatever the premise of that movement was why give these guys your time and money quit don't use it you don't need it now that's a lot more in line with the type of writing and thinking that i do about social media so i like the quit facebook movement the boycott facebook movement that under Assumption that Facebook is so crucial that we have to fix it instead of avoid it That's kind of heading in a different direction than I try to lead people.

All right, so let's move on now and answer some questions about the deep life. Alicia asks, how do you answer questions so smoothly? What kind of deliberate practice do you do for public speaking? Alicia, I appreciate the kind of words. The pressure is kind of on now, though. if I stumble over myself a lot in this question, I think that would be ironic. But my short answer is, I'm good at answering questions smoothly or public speaking because I do it for a living. This may seem like a trite answer, but I think it's important to actually emphasize the work that goes into what you then observe somewhat casually because in a lot of different professional endeavors, it's easy to see the person doing the thing relatively well and just say, wow, they're better at it than.

me, I guess this is not my cup of tea, where the reality is there's often a lot of training under it. So let me unpack this a little bit. You know, I've been doing, for example, television and radio since I was in my early 20s. When I was just a, what, two years into my grad program, just to give you a sense of the abnormal nature of my life, I was flown out to Redmond, to Microsoft to do media training with their communications team. And then they flew me in a out to Manhattan. We had a studio in Times Square. I was a spokesperson for their back-to-school technology campaign. And we did a satellite tour, or they built a whole stage, a sound stage that I stood in front of. And then I went over to the New York network affiliates to do

live on camera where we walked around the table like you see in the morning shows and point to different Microsoft technology and explain to the host. And so I was being trained on how to do this at a really young age. I was doing TV and radio for my books. My first books came out in 2005, so a year out of college. So I was doing TV and radio pretty early in my 20s as well. I started public speaking quite a bit, probably by the age of 24. That's when I first started getting paid and flown places to speak in front of crowds. And nowadays, you know, with a typical book launch, like my last book launch for digital minimalism, I probably did 150 interviews in seven or eight months, which is all to say, I've worked at it a lot.

I've been trained professionally and then I've done it at a professional level for a really long time. And I would say I'm okay at it. You know, in the world of public speaking, for example, there's inspirational keynoters who are masters of controlling a room. Malcolm Gladwell is a masterful keynote speaker. He memorizes every beat of his speeches. Now, it comes across. It's just, wow, this guy is really smart and has a lot of smart ideas.

but notice that there's no interjections, no pauses, no extra consideration, because technically those beats are memorized and polished. So I'm middle of the pack when it comes to professional speakers, but I've done enough of it that I can sit in front of a microphone and answer some questions without too many likes and without too many ums. So I'm glad you asked that question, Alicia, not that people care that much about public speaking, but because I think people are often somewhat overwhelmed. by seeing someone do something at a professional level, saying they're not professional

engine thinking, I guess that's not me. And again, there's almost always, you look at these accomplishment icebergs, there is a lot under the surface, a lot of effort and a lot of work. And that should give you hope, because that means once you choose which iceberg you want to scale, you know you can get to the top, and you're much more likely to get there if you know the obstacles that you'll actually face. Sahana asks, how do I get back on track after a big failure? Now, she gives a little bit more elaboration on this question

that she took a very important professional exam and did a lot worse than she thought she would, even though she prepared a lot. Well, Sahana, I appreciate this question because it allows me to pull a classic idea from the old study hacks blog post that focused on student advice. So back in those classic study. the hacks post, I had this notion called the post-exam post-mortem. The idea was that after you get an

exam back, especially if the grade is lower than you wish it would be, you should do what I call a post-mortem, where you actually look at how you studied, you look at your results and you try to get some answers. And the questions you want to answer are the following. One, what preparation effort really seem to pay off? So for a future test like this, I should do that. or do more of that? Second, what thing that I spend time on during preparation for this test that was probably a waste? Didn't end up having a big impact on how I did was probably just eating up available cycles. And three, what thing that I avoid or not do a lot of? Then now that I see the test, now that I see the grades, I realized if I had done that,

I would have done much better on this test. You answer those three questions. that allows you to come up with an evidence-based plan for the next exam of this type, how you're going to prepare for it, and your preparation is going to be much better. The original idea for the post-exam post-mortem actually came from a class I took very early in graduate school. It's my first year at MIT. I took a course called Distributive Systems. It was taught by Robert Morris. Robert Morris, I think, he's well-known.

He worked with Paul Graham. As a graduate student, he famously brought. the internet with the Morris Worm. Anyway, like a well-known professor. I took a distributed systems class. And I'm the guy with the good study habits, right? I'd literally written two books about it at this point. I'm taking this exam, and I'm doing my study, and I take the first exam, and I do terrible.

And it matters if you do terrible at MIT. It's pretty brutal the coursework in the PhD program and the computer science program, because the idea is you basically have to get A's. you know, you're not really supposed to do bad. I assume you can just get A's. There's something called the technical qualifying exam that requires A's and four courses from certain buckets, and the details aren't important. It's just not good. You don't want to do bad in one of these core courses like distributed systems.

But after despairing for, I don't know, 20 minutes, I called my wife, and she wasn't my wife then, but I complained. I did a postmortem. When I did the postmortem, I was like, oh, most of the study activities I was doing, didn't really help prepare me for this exam. Now, I don't remember what I was doing, but I remember clearly when I did my post-mortem what the right answer was. I looked at the exam questions and said, oh, I get the type of exams Professor Morris gives. And what I need to do, the best way that I could have prepared for this is take all these papers he assigned about these distributed systems and focus on the plots, the plots that show performance under different scales.

or different values. Understand those plots. I realized that's what he was testing. And for good reason, I mean, what he was really getting at is if you really want to understand like a paper written about a distributed system, you've got to understand what were they measuring,

what were they seeing. Why did the performance double when they quadrupled the servers involved? You know, so the plots, I realized, the plots in the papers he assigned had all the information. And the right way to study is actually going to be to study

every plot and every paper and be able to explain out loud as if you're teaching to a class, class, what's going on in that plot, and why the curve or the histogram or the scatter plot looks the way it does. I studied that way for the next exam, and I did very well. Same with the next exam. It got the A in the course. So that's when I came up the idea of the post-exam post-mortem. I had a broader concept I eventually developed in those classic study hacks post that I called study like Darwin. And the notion is if you keep doing these post-exam post-mortems, your techniques for

studying for various types of tests are going to evolve to be better and better and better until eventually you're very, very good at studying for exactly this type of test. You're going to get very high grades and your study time is going to plummet compared to your friends because you are evolving and improving, not just throwing hours at it. So Sahana, that's what I would recommend for this particular challenge of studying for a professional exam, but to the broader audience, let's generalize this approach to a much more broader class of pursuits. If you are not happy with your performance in a professional endeavor, don't just be frustrated. Go back and figure out what worked in your efforts, what was a waste of time, what should you

have spent more time doing, make that your plan going forward, have confidence in that plan, trust that plan, and move on. Evolving your techniques is how you get better. Edwin asks, should I stick with it even if I don't like it? he elaborates one can infer from your book so good they can't ignore you that in order to cultivate a professional skill you need to stick with it well edwin's a good question i think the broad question here is when should you stick with the disciplined and deliberate pursuit of a skill or more broadly a profession and when should you switch now your elaboration for this question

implied that you expected my answer to be you should always just stick with it even if you don't like get you got to get better at things that's going to take hard work that's partially true but i also give a lot of reasons why you might not stick with a disciplined and deliberate pursuit of a particular skill set so in so good that can't ignore you i say look in order to transform a career into something that is satisfying and potentially later a source of passion there are some criteria i mean it has to be something you find interesting you have to generally enjoy the people you are around and it has to be a pursuit or field in which if you get really good, the options that will grant you are options

that appeal or resonate with you. So if what you're pursuing is falling short of any of those three categories, then you should consider a shift. Right. So maybe you fall into what I call the law partner paradox, right? You got a lot of kids coming out of good schools and they're smart. And they say, what should I do? I'm smart. And they say, well, I can go to a really good law school. That's open to me because I went to a good school. And I should basically get the reward of going to a good school. And they go to the good law school and say, okay, what's the competitive thing to do now? Say, well, it's to get a job at a competitive big city law firm, because that's only open to people who go to good law schools. I went to a good law school,

and I want to take full advantage of the opportunities I open. So they end up at the big city law firm. They feel good about the job. You know, first year associate at one of these big firms will start at 170, 180, 200K. So they're like, okay, there we go. It's a good starting salary for the training I did and all the elite schools I went to. So what's next? I'm going to work hard at this and it's brutal. Maybe it's brutal. You know, the hours are terrible.

You're up late. If you're in litigation, your vacations are getting canceled. You know, you're on your way to your kids play and you have to instead go home to tend to fax machine unexpectedly. It's brutal. But it's okay because if I do this, I'll get to partner. And then at some point you have this realization that, wait a second, when you become a partner, it's not like things get better.

It's not like now suddenly you have much less work to do, or now you have a lot more autonomy, or now your life gets much easier. It actually is just more of the same. You just have an extra responsibility of bringing in business on top of all of these billables. I call that the law partner paradox because you realize the thing I'm suffering for now is actually not going to alleviate the suffering. It's not the reward that's going to alleviate the suffering. It's actually just going to cause more.

So that example violates my criteria of the possibilities for what you get when you get really good is something that appeals or resonates. So if being even more worked does not appeal or resonate, then getting really good in a law position, for example, might not be worth the effort. Someone if you don't like the people, or if it seems a little scammy, like, I don't know, this is kind of against my values. What am I doing here that's useful? I know a lot of people who've gone to Wall Street type setups where they've had this exact issue. Like, what am I really doing here? How is this benefiting the world? That's a problem. If you don't like the people, if it goes against your values, it doesn't matter how good you get. It's not going to be a source of satisfaction.

And if the field turns out to be way more dull than you thought, you know, you got the position with the Washington Nationals front office. Like, I love baseball. This is going to be great. But you realize your position in marketing is basically you have to do Twitter post all day. I go, this isn't baseball. This is not as interesting as I thought. If it's not actually interesting, that's another disqualification.

So, Edwin, there's a lot of disqualifications to what I'm trying to say. It's not like you can just throw a dart at a job listing. And whatever you see, if you stick with it, that will be a source of passion. No, it's much harder than that. But what I try to emphasize in so good they can't ignore you is that not just any job is going to make you happy. But the bar is significantly lower than the story that we've been told, which is that there's only one job that's going to make you happy. Your true passion that exists in a little ball of glowing glass inside your disnified heart.

And if you can just find that one true passion, everything will go well. That story is nonsense. That bar is way too high. The opposite story that like any job can be passion just work hard, that's not true either. But there's this big, thick middle. It's interesting. You like the people. It doesn't go against your value.

It gives you good options if you get good. There might be a dozen jobs you come to your mind past those criteria. Any of those can be a source of passion. But if you go down one of those paths and realize, whoops, I got one of these criteria wrong, then you do want to switch. And if you do make the switch, the advice they always give is do not take your stores of career capital that you've already developed in that field and dump them in the ocean to go do something new. the extent to which you're able to take existing career capital and transfer it into a new job so that you are not starting from scratch in career capital development, the extent to which you can do that, you should, because you do not want to give up the ground that you've already

built from all that disciplined and deliberate work. Right, Edwin, so hopefully that answer is a little bit less stark than you hope, and if you are in a position right now that does not satisfy all those criteria, I want to give you the motivation. don't suffer. You can do something else. Bring your career capital with you. Use those criteria to select it, but there's no reason to suffer. Mark asks, what's your opinion of critical theory? Now, Mark, this is a complicated question in large part because critical theory is very complicated. it. I mean, as an academic theory, just its evolution in history, it's very difficult to get one's arms around. It requires quite a bit of study to really understand not just what modern critical

theory claims, but where it comes from, what its influences are, how it's changed over time. Now, I'm not an expert on critical theory. I know about it, in part because I've been an academic for my entire adult life, and critical theory plays a very influential role in academia throughout that period. I've also studied it to some extent. So when I was at MIT, doing my doctorate in computer science,

they had a requirement that says you have to also do a minor. And it has to be outside your department in which you're getting your doctorate. So, of course, most CS students will do their minor in mathematics. Right? Very pragmatic.

But I was a pain, and I'd come from a liberal art school. So I did my minor while at MIT and roughly speaking art history. There's not an art history department there, but roughly speaking art history. But it was very influenced by a critical theory. So I also at the graduate level studied some critical theory. But I'm not an expert. No means an expert. So I want to make that caveat clear.

I have what I would call an academic layman's understanding of roughly speaking, the academic origins and ideas of critical theory. Now, it's playing a really big role in our culture right now. So, you know, a lot of the ideas that emerged, especially in the recent last couple of months, in the protest after George Floyd and the protest against racism, you've heard ideas like Kindy's anti-racism or DeAngelo's white fragility. These are all things that fall under the much broader umbrella of what you would actually more accurately called postmodern critical theory. So it's a very relevant topic. And I have been

talking about on this podcast recently that when there's an issue you care about, it's important that you try to actually build some intellectual roots, right? You don't want to just go to Twitter and take some marching orders and say, I don't know what this means, but I guess this is what we're doing today. It's good to understand things. You want to understand philosophies and you want to take other philosophies to critique it and crash them together. And in that dialectic, you get your intellectual will roots go deep? And then you can really have a strong foundation on which to advocate for change or understand the world, etc. And so given the importance of postmodern critical theory, it is important to know more about it. So I'm going to do my

best mark to give you what I know about its history. You have something more substantial to build on when you're thinking about critical theory as it lends through which encountering the world. But again, my caveat is I'm not an expert. And in fact, I invite any listeners, academic listeners who are more experts on postmodern critical theory, you can send your corrections to me at interesting at calnewport.com. So if I don't get something quite right, which I won't, because it's complicated. Really complicated intellectual lineage. Correct me where I'm wrong, and I'll do my best to correct a record. All right, so let's try to do this. No notes, no preparation, Mark. I'm going to try to give you the academic layman's history of postmodern critical

theory. So in the beginning we have Karl Marx. We have his theories, which were predominantly economic theories. So it's about the oppression of the worker by the owners of the capital. Marx had a very complex economic theory about these dynamics, how they're inevitable, how this type of industrial setups, which were relatively new at the time that he was thinking about this, that these type of industrial setups were going to be unavoidably exploitative, but that he also had this deterministic view of history, where that was going to, that class was going to also unavoidably drive forward history into a set pattern that would lead to this workers' revolt and a completely change to the over underlying economic system.

So it was just like really exciting big think theory, but it was primarily economic in nature. Okay, so then you get in the like the 1920s and 30s, I guess, if I have my timeline right, you have a school of thought that really builds off of economic Marxism that was known as critical theory. And I think this came largely, it was founded in Germany, and you have like Marqueuse and Adorno, among others in the Frankfurt School in Germany really helped develop what became known as critical theory and very roughly speaking, and now I'm really starting to gloss things over. This original bout of critical theory was expanding Marx's style of dissections of the sort of the worker being exploited by the owners of capital, leaving the realm of economics and going to other parts of culture and society,

and trying to unpack other elements of culture or society, that maybe implicitly or by design was meant to sort of further this economic exploitation. And it's where you get ideas like base in superstructure theory, you know, it's not just what's happening in the factories. It's not just the conditions of the workers, but like the way the literature works in a culture, the way that the nationalism works in a culture, that these are all serving towards the same purpose of trying to keep down or oppress or exploit the working class by those who own the capital. So it was like a, you. an act of intellectual, I don't know, bravado.

These were very complicated theories, very exciting for theoreticians or, you know, smart people, smart academics. This was like exciting theory because old-fashioned Marxism was maybe getting a little bit stale and this injected some new energy. But my understanding is that's classic critical theory is still very much about class and economics. Okay. Now we get to, let's say, like the 1960s. and sort of class-based Marxism and all of his variants in general are starting to lose some steam, especially in the academy and especially in the U.S.

Part of the problem is that a lot of countries took these ideas and said, we'll use them as a political playbook, and let's build a whole system of governing based around Marx's ideas. And you would get, for example, the Soviet Union or what happened in China. And word was kind of unavoidably leaking out by the time you got to. to the 60s that things weren't necessarily going so well. This is where you get like Solzhenician's work gets translated and finds a big audience in the English-speaking world. And it does not paint a very flattering picture of the Soviet Union. And so you begin to lose a little bit of energy for some of these ideas, which had otherwise been very dominant. I think critical theory,

what was key about the original critical theory is that it took these ideas about the way that there's these inevitable exploitative relationships, power relationships between different classes. And it took it out of economics and allowed it to be deployed in other fields. So now you could be an anthropologist or sociologist or whatever and come at your craft through this lens of critical theory, that you're unpacking these sort of hidden power structures that are all put in place to exploit classes. All right. So again, we start to lose some steam, 1950s,

Marxism is losing some of its scene because of working out from the Soviet Union. The other interesting shift that happens around here is that in the U.S. in particular, as we get from the 60s and to the 70s, the political left begins to become less, they begin to see the working class less as their natural constituent. In part, like the working class voted for Nixon and they didn't like that. They supported the Vietnam War. They believe they were on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. that was going on. So you also have sort of the political left, which is where all the thinkers

in the academies were, you know, obviously from, they were also souring a little bit on the working class. It wasn't as exciting to them. And again, I don't know if this is, I'm simplifying things here, but there was a split where they're like, okay, maybe we're not, maybe class exploitation is not really, that's not really the cause we want to fight for because the people working in these factories voted for Nixon to greatly simplify things. All right. And then the final nail in the coffin is you get into the 60s and to the 70s, a new exciting thing pops up in the world of academic thinking, which is French postmodernism. And now you get Derrida and Lacan and Foucault. And they're basically really smart guys who are just blowing everything up.

They were nihilistic. It was a nihilistic philosophy. They came in and everything could be deconstructive. Everything you think is true is just invented, it's just constructed, even though the meanings of words are. arbitrary signifiers and signs being matched through these sort of inscrutable power dynamic processes. Like, just they were deconstructing everything, including any grand narrative. And so originally the French postmodernist were like Marxism is so, that's so like from a left perspective, man, that's so earnest. It's kind of nerdy. You know, like you have this big grand narrative about how the world works. And come on. There's no, there is no grand narrative. We're all

nihilistic. And this was this was very cool within academic circles. And so the French postmodernist came in. They're very nihilistic and it led to this big period of deconstruction in lots of fields. And that became the fad. Because again, in academia, especially in sort of the non, we'll call it the non-empirical field. So the field where you're not essentially doing hypotheses and then have empirical evidence about whether or not your hypotheses are true or not, like a physicist or a biologist, new waves of theory is exciting because it allows the young generation something to master this complicated. And you get new insight. Avantgard theory generates, though it often has, you know, wacky elements, avant garde theory often does push forward. The boundary of our understanding of the world,

it does introduce new ideas, new ways of thinking. So it's, you've got to keep refreshing. You've got to keep refreshing the world of theory with like new theory. And this was the exciting theory. So this is like a nadir for this classic class-based Marxist influence theory is because like Marxism, we weren't so happy about it, and the French postmodernist, they were cool, like they were literally cool, and they were kind of down on it, and they were just deconstructing everything, and that's where the cool kids were. Then we get, if I'm under, and again, I'm not doing this with notes. I didn't really prepare.

I'm just based on what I've been exposed to as a professional academic, so please correct me when I'm getting some details wrong here. I'm just trying to give a general trajectory for the sort of non-academic here. There's an interesting shift that begins. on the academic left in the 80s, I would say. They start moving on from the nihilism of the early French postmoderns. And they begin, thinkers begin to return. They said, like, we like the progressive nature of the old Marxist theories,

because at least we were trying to do, you know, we were trying to do something. We were like Plato's philosopher kings from the republic, where we were trying to use our mind to improve the world, and there's a lot of good intention there. And so you start to see some papers published in peer-review journals at this period where they say, you know, I think that the general impulse behind like original critical theory and original economic Marxism, this general impulse to improve is good. But I think we just need a change to target, right? Class is not where we need to be focusing its identity groups. This is kind of the interesting future of sort of progressive academic theory is going to be on identity groups. And this is not a secret.

And this is just in the literature, right? The problem is they needed theoretical framework for this because all of critical theory and Marxism had been built on, you know, very specifically about labor and capital and class relations. And you couldn't migrate that over to identity groups. And also, you wouldn't really want to because we went through this whole period of, you know, Marxism wasn't cool in academic circles anymore and the French were making fun of it. And, you know, Solzhenitin was talking about the Soviets and it looked so good. All right? So they said, we need a new theoretical tools to help, like, study this issue of how identity groups are being oppressed by other identity groups.

And they turn to the French postmoderns. Now, it's kind of ironic here, right, because the French postmoderns had completely dismissed grand narratives like Marxism. And now here's this new grand narrative that's going to be built up about the way identity groups are oppressed. And they turn to those same French postmoderns and said, we really like your tools because these are what's really popular. It's what all the kind of like the exciting young academics are doing in these fields. We want to use your tools. We want to use Foucault. We want to use Foucault.

We want to use Foucault. These tools you invented to deconstruct everything, we want to use them to actually help us support and construct another grand narrative. So there's some irony there. And I think this is a point of confusion. You know, I think there's a lot of commentary on this. sort of postmodern critical theory that emerged. It's like, you guys don't know what you're talking about because what do you mean it's postmodern and Marxist? Like the postmoderns hated the Marxist, but this is what happened, right? The deconstructing tools of the postmoderns were then

taken to construct a new grand narrative. All right, so what does this lead to? So it's a lot of intellectual fermented excitement, right? Because again, you need waves. Theory has to come in waves. otherwise thinking gets stale and intellectual progress at that avant-garde halts. All right, so what does this lead to? So in the 90s, you begin to see, for example, the rise of area studies, area study departments or programs within university.

So this is where you see African-American studies or women studies or queer studies, these are essentially new areas of focus that are saying we're going to apply this new emerging, what we can call now postmodern critical theory. So what it's going to be is it's a critical theory, right? So we're going to look at, you know, ways in which subtle things in the culture or society are, you know, potentially oppressing or holding back various groups. But we're going to use the tools of postmodernism to understand it. We're going to use Foucault's power hierarchies. We're going to use Derrida's sort of sign and signifier split.

We're going to use these postmodern tools, but we're going to apply them for a critical theory. But unlike the original critical theory, forget class. We're going to look at racial and ethnic identity groups or gender groups, different types of groups, but list various identity groups. And so those area studies that popped up in the 90s, this is this new exciting type of theory emerging, putting its foothold into academia. Right. So that's the beginning. There's also work happening in law schools. I mean, there's a lot of different.

Again, it was an exciting area. That's what we're going to call postmodern critical theory. So that's where we first start to see it arise in the area studies. You get to the 2000s. And just like the original critical theory did back in the earliest 20th century, it moves into other of the non-emperical fields. It's not really messing with or changing around biology, but if you're in sociology, just like before,

if you're in anthropology, if you're in literature, if you're in medieval studies, postmodern critical theory comes in and it opens up new types of thinking, it opens up new types of papers, it opens up new job roles, it opens up new tenure slots, because it's very hard, it's a very complicated theory. So those who can master it, it's actually selecting for sharp brains, right? It's very complicated to master. And also just, again, you need theory has to come in waves. You can't stick with the same theoretical framework forever. It gets stale. The avant-garde starts moving. So then it begins moving into all sorts of parts of the academy, just like the original critical theory did.

So, like, you know, look, if you were on a college campus, like an elite college campus in the 1950s, this would be very common that you would, you're an anthro class, and it would really use like Marxist's critical theory to try to understand different cultures. It had gone into a lot of different fields, and then it kind of died out, and now we have postmodern critical theory. Moving into most of these other fields. then there's a big shift and now we're getting pretty contemporaneous with my own academic career so now I'm just sort of in part just observations from looking around my own world

there's a shift in the 2000s where the postmodern critical theory moved from just becoming a new tool in a lot of these fields to becoming sort of the only tool in a lot of these fields and I think this was in part because

of this unusual setup where we created new programs, the area study programs, that their entire point was let's apply this new framework to this particular group. Like the whole point of like an African-American studies area program was like we want to, the whole point is to apply postmodern critical theory to this particular identity group

and see what we get out of this investigation. So the area studies that brought postmodern critical theory into the academy, brought them into the sort of, whatever you would call it, homogeneous intellectual environments, because that was the whole point. So then you had researchers coming out of area studies who were used to thinking about, like, well, these are the tools. This is it.

This is what we use. And so when it went into other fields, that kind of hegemonic nature was natural. And it began to push out other theory. And it became, you would see these wars, these interseen wars happen and kind of field after field, postmodern critical theory would win and basically say you can't do any other theory here. So it became a very powerful source in a very powerful idea within the academy. And as we get to the mid-2000s, it also works its way into the administration of universities. And so now there's a lot of like administrating happening in the universities that is based on the foundation of postmodern critical theory is correct.

It is an accurate, the most accurate understanding we have of how the world works. And so when we're thinking about policies or this or that, well, that's what we should use as our guide to figuring out policies. Our platonic philosopher kings that use their intellect to help rule us in the best possible way are telling us that postmodern critical theory is the new, this is the thing. This is the theory that makes sense of the world. So then you start to see a lot of policymaking begin to happen. The financial crisis really throws the influence of postmodern critical theory to a new level. So after the financial crisis in 2007 and 2009, we begin to see a much more aggressive spread of the ideas outside of the academy. So once it's so prevalent in the academy and everyone's graduating going to the world, we've seen a lot of major news like in the media sphere and in a lot of like the major corporate spheres, like the large companies.

These ideas come in where it's just now becomes, again, it's very hegemonic. Like, yeah, this is the right way to understand the world. right so it's an incredibly successful theory it's like an idea that started in the 80s and then emerged in the area of studies then took over other areas and got into the administration and then universities like platonic like Plato's republic begin to run themselves

like what happens if we run ourselves with postmodern critical theory as our assumption for how the world actually works and then it it got from there into the media it got from there into the corporate world as well it's very influential in education school So I think because of that, there's a trickle-down effect. It's also very influential in K-12 schooling as well, because if you're an administrator,

you know, you're training in academic environments, right? So it's a remarkably, from a memetic standpoint, this is a remarkably successful intellectual theory. And it's a very complicated. I'm using this term like it's one thing. It's incredibly fractuous. And you can find two people that I might call postmodern critical theorists who completely disagree with each other about a ton of things. So just keep that in mind.

I'm using this very loosely just for the sake of. of clarity here. And so that's kind of the, that's kind of where things are. And so then when we've had some sort of major cultural events like the election of Donald Trump, I think the, the doubling down on this particular framework by those who opposed Donald Trump, I think, reached a new level. And so you saw like an increased sort of, what do you say, commitment to this theory. And then in the recent sort of tragic events, these occurrences of public racism, postmodern critical theory was turned to largely, as this is going to be the source of answers. And this is bringing us all the way to Mark's original question. One of the strands of postmodern critical theory is what's known as critical race theory, started at Harvard Law School, but now expanded to way broader than just legal concerns.

It's actually what the term intersectionality comes in part out of critical race theory, Kimberly Krenshaw. But this particular strand within the much larger and complicated mosaic of post-martin critical theory is this is where you get anti-racism and where you get things like white fragility that right now are obviously hugely on the cultural radar and probably why Mark is asking the question. So if you haven't been in the academic world and now, you know, you wake up and it's August 2020, and you're hearing these sort of concepts, you know, now just being publicly talked about a lot, these books are on the bestseller, it's like, where did this come from? That's the whole story. So it's a, you know, theory has to refresh itself. And this has been like the latest wave of theory to catch on.

And it's, I think it's been as influential as, I was going to say as influential as the original Marxism. That's not really true. I mean, in the academy, in the sense that it has such. such a power in the academy. We got to give Marxism the nod for being more influential just in general because obviously you have dozens of countries that change their governing structure around the theories. Okay, he's had more influence. But within the academy, there was a period where economic, class-based Marxism just influenced everything. And that's really the case now is that this is sort of like postmodern identity-based critical theories, really so influential

in the academy and has because of that now has a huge foothold in the cold. cultural conversation. So what's my take on this particular theory? Well, again, I'm not an expert on postmodern critical theory. So I can't give you a nuanced critique. I can't even give you a very nuanced critique of, okay, here are the most popular emergent alternatives. I know they exist. So actually, on the left flank, in the academy, on the left flank of postmodern critical theory is new competing theories from people who feel like postmodern critical theory is not sufficiently efficacious, that it's become too inward focused on theory for the sake of theory, and it's not causing the change it should.

So there's actually like an attack from the left within the academy. But I don't know that strand of new thinking very well, right? So I can't give a nuanced critique. Like what are the leading alternatives? How do they clash? What are the results of this clash? It's very complicated. I'm not an expert on it.

I will say in general, as a lifelong academic, avant-garde theory is really important to human progress. If you're given completely to the forces of conservatism, and I mean this, not politically speaking, but philosophically speaking, if you give in the forces of conservatism and don't push the intellectual boundaries with complicated new ideas, you tend not to actually move progress forward. Because the avant-garde with political theory is often, well, it's often kind of strange, right? I mean, read the original French postmodernist.

It's strange. In some cases, almost unreadable. But what comes in behind this, as you move that avant-garde forward, it drags behind it forward the sort of standard cultural understanding of issues. It's why you read Derrida on the 60s. You're like, what is he talking about? Right? But without Derrida, you don't have today in the 2020s people being very comfortable with ideas like a brand is a signifier.

and the notion that the Nike swoosh is not just a swoosh but can actually have this arbitrary meaning associated with it. And the whole Nike brand is trying to encapsulate this all in this image. We're very comfortable with that type of thinking today in popular culture. But Derrida had to push the avant-garde forward before the rest of the culture came forward. It's just like in fashion. You know, you look at the Paris Fashion Week. You say, my God, look at that crazy outfit that model's wearing.

That's like a full-out military uniform with like men. metals, but it's a halter top. And, you know, like, no one's ever going to wear that, right? But see, that's not the point. That's pushing the avant-garde forward and ideas from that avant-garde then trickle down in the popular culture. And six months later, you're buying a shirt at Old Navy and it has epaulettes. It was influenced by that avant-garde be pushed for it. So I'm a big believer, right? Academic avant-garde theory is crucial. The conservative impulse to not push forward change leads to stagnation. Now, that being said, if I'm going to try to pin down one thing that maybe makes me nervous about our current intellectual state,

it would be this sort of creeping tendency in some circles that are really embracing postmodern critical theory as the explanation for how the world works. There's this creeping tendency in some circles, not all, but in some circles to add a self-defensive plank to the theory, which says, and any critique of this theory, any exploration of an alternative theory, is evidence that you are the worst of the thing that this theory is trying to fight. Now, this is actually an idea borrowed from Theocracy, the heretic principle, you know, where the religious heads of the religion in a state would say, like, if you question, if you're going to Martin Luther us here, that's evidence that you're influenced by the devil.

right heretics heretics need to be punished some of that i think is emerging you know i think certainly in i know the academy better than i understand the cultural applications of critical theory but certainly in the academy there's there's an increasing number of fields where you know it it's really trouble it's really trouble if you explore an approach that's not postmodern critical theory or if you critique postmodern critical theory as far as i can tell the serious critiques of postmodern modern critical theory stopped in the 90s. And today, depending on the field, it can be quite dangerous. And there's definitely job repercussions. And I think that impulse of our theory says that any critique of our theory is bad, that is a very dangerous intellectual impulse. I'm a huge fan of

avant-garde theory. But as soon as you take any theory and say one of the key planks of this theory is that it is the only theory and any attempt to question this theory or look at any other theory is a sign that you're a bad person. As soon as you do that, you're not advancing anymore. You're going to cause a weird inward focus spiral. And we saw this exact thing happened in the Marxist revolutions, right? I mean, eventually, critical theory was used to make the claim that any questioning of Marxist theory was just evidence that you were part of the bourgeois conspiracy to oppress a proletariat.

To question the very specific claims of Marxist theory at some point became evidence that you were an enemy of the people. And then that led to purges and purity spirals where everyone was trying to be more purely. I'm more purely on the side of the working man than you are. And they said, but this person is more pure than you. So you're going to go to the gulog. And when you do those cycles of sort of purity and purges, the people who win aren't the best people. It's the strongest people. And they tend to be sociopaths. You tend to get Stalin. And then things don't go well. So, all right, that's a bit of an alarmist tangent. But it's just to say, in general, I think the of theory tells us that avant-garde theory is great, but you do not want to add a plank to theory

that says there can be no other. You cannot add a plank that says critiques of this theory is evidence of malfeasance. Historically speaking, such planks reduce the ability of a theory to actually create the change that it wants to create. Now again, I'm not an expert on postmodern critical theory. I'm not an expert on this particular critique, if we want to call it that, probably the right person to look to with that particular issue would be Jonathan Haidt at NYU. He runs an organization called the Heterodox University. And it has a very simple premise, which I think is historically very justified. And the premise of Heterodox University, as far as I know, I don't know a lot about it,

but as far as I know, is it says we don't care about any particular theory. There's no particular theory we're saying is good. There's no particular theory we're saying is bad. That's not what we're about. but we do believe strongly that an academic institution has to have more than one theory active. You don't have to have a ton. You don't have to let every crackpot theory have a platform at university, but there has to be more than one. If you have two theories competing in a given field, they keep each other honest and they both get sharper and they both get better, their explanatory power gets better, and if their progressive theories, their ability to improve the world gets better.

When you shift from two to one, it's a seismic change. It's the whole idea of heterodox university. When you go from two to one and there's no competing theory, when you add the plank that says you're not allowed to have a competing theory, then it goes haywire. And it turns inward, and it gets scholastic, and it gets convoluted, and you get purity spirals, and the whole thing goes into weird directions. And so I like this heterodox university idea because it's like, look,

he doesn't claim to be an expert on critical theory either. He's just saying there needs to be more than one theory. There doesn't have to be 10. There has to be at least two. and then the academy can do what the academy does, which is to keep pushing forward human thought with the goal of trying to improve humanity. All right.

So he talks about that better than I do. You might want to take him more seriously. You take me. There you go, Mark. That is, that's my lecture. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to give a whole, like, class-style lecture, especially on a topic I don't know a lot about. So I would say probably 30% of that academic lineage I gave.

Probably about 30% is wrong. So, I mean, look, don't, don't cite me. in your dissertation because you're not going to pass, right? I mean, this, again, I'm just an academic layman just trying to speak on my general understanding of this field based on just studying it a little bit and just having spent my adult life surrounded by it. The short answer is postmodern critical theory has a long lineage. It's incredibly successful, memetically speaking. It's incredibly influential right now. I'm a big fan of avant-garde theory. I think they do bring forward, the avant-garde moving forward, brings forward the popular understanding of the

world. It trails behind, but brings it forward in a way. You have to have progress or you stagnate. And my only point of, hey, here's something to keep an eye on, if you want to be a sort of independent observer of such things, is be very careful about any effort, though, to take any theory to say, no other theories are allowed, as Jonathan Haight so compellingly argues, an academy with one theory allowed is exponentially less effective than an academy with two that's allowed. And so we just want to make sure that we do not end up in that place regardless of the particular content of any particular theory. All right. So I'm exhausted. I've probably exhausted you with that impromptu lecture. So why don't we wrap up this episode right

here. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to have a chance to submit your own, sign up for my mailing list at calduport.com to help spread the word. Please leave a review. please leave a rating. Those things really do matter. Thanks for sticking with me with the sort of okay sound and my new DeepWork HQ. I'm working on it and the sound that's only going to get better and better as I get the time to work on sound dampening. And until next time, as always, stay deep.