Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 182: Cal’s Business Model

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaUpdate on Cal’s writing [0:43]- Tips for preparing for an upcoming training. [19:32]- Your business model. [24:06]- Managing guiding documents. [35:26]- Becoming a better writer. [44:21]- Curing deep procrastination. [51:02]Thanks to our Sponsors:MyBodyTutor.comBlinkist.com/DeepGrammarly.com/DeepWorkable.com/podcastThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 182. I'm here on my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I should explain why I was a little bit late getting to the recording session this morning. It's for good reasons. I was writing, and sometimes when I'm writing, especially in the morning, I lose track. I lose track of time. but I figured this would be an interesting peek inside what's going on in my writing life.

Until recently I've been working on book proposal writing. And then that changed. I handed off the latest drafts of those to my agent, and I shifted this morning back to working on a new article for the New Yorker. And it was a huge relief, and I got lost in the writing. And the reason why it's a huge relief, and it's a little bit of insider baseball, but I, I really dislike proposal writing. And a lot of authors feel the same way. Authors do not like writing book proposals.

There's a couple of reasons for it. One, there's no craft to it. When you're writing a proposal, you're not trying to produce good writing. So it's kind of frustrating. A proposal is more like you're putting together, you know, a business plan. It's expository. It's information. And there's no reason to make it be written really well.

and it's not the style of writing that you're used to doing. It's not narrative nonfiction. It's not idea writing. It's let's walk through bullet points like what you need to know about this book. So that's part of the frustration. Two, the content of proposals often feels very, I don't know, signaling and hollow. It's hard. You're not writing about a concrete thing you know.

You're talking about like bombastically what might happen or what this book might be about or what marketing things you're thinking of. And a lot of it is just a game. Like you're signaling, you're signaling commitment. people know these things are going to change. And so it's frustrating writing. You feel like you're writing in a tone you're not comfortable with. It's not craft and it's not that concrete. And no one likes doing it.

But you have to do it. It's for whatever reason. It's the way the publishing industry works. So it's always a relief, or at least it was a relief for me to the shift away from proposal writing, which is very mechanistic and signaling, and to New Yorker writing, where now you're actually trying to craft. You have these points you want to make that you have to put into some sort of structure that's going to bring the reader along.

There's decisions to be made. And so I had a nice old-fashioned writing morning. I went over to the local coffee shop, had breakfast there at the coffee shop. I did some writing there because I like getting the coffee and the mug there with you get a free refill if you buy it there. So I was writing there. And then I relocated because I'm an addict to Starbucks at some point, got a different type of coffee there and was writing there for a while. I like to move and the walk from the coffee shop to Starbucks and I went by my house on the way there. I was working through the next section I was going to write.

It's like a puzzle and then I got the Starbucks. I wrote a little bit more. And then I lost track of time and ran over here to the studio. But to me it's like an ideal morning writing, change location right, change location, right, trying to craft something. I mean, that's basically what I like doing. And it's not something I've got to do a lot of recently. So that was nice. Now, I should give a quick update on those proposals.

The two books I'm working on right now, as mentioned before on the podcast, is potentially one on the deep life and potentially one on slow productivity. Very interested in both topics and we're getting closer. In my ideal world, I want to be writing as soon as the spring semester ends in early May. I want to be almost full-time book writing. So I'm excited about that. I'm thinking about trying, by the way, starting in May. the John McPhee method. So I wrote an essay about this last week on my newsletter at calnewport.com about John McPhee's

slow productivity. And what I emphasize in that article is that by his own admission, McPhee rarely writes more than 500 words a day. Now that's not nothing, but that's not a huge amount. That's not Brandon Sanderson level of productivity. And yet he is on the big time scale, very prolific. He's written 29 books. He's won a Pulitzer.

Two of them have been nominated for National Book Awards. He has this very long archive of articles for the New Yorker. He's been writing for the New Yorker since 1965. Very distinctive famous articles for them as well. And it's 500 words a day. It just adds up. And his quote is if you add a, keep adding an ounce to a bucket, you will eventually have a court.

Little Pounce of Works adds up. I've resisted doing that with my writing before word count-based writing. I'm thinking about trying it this summer. just start every day with 500 words every single day book chapters New Yorker articles but just always 500 words research editing all that type of stuff can happen whenever whenever I can fit it

but the 500 words a day just making that a core just producing because I really do miss it we're in a very busy period at Georgetown we're doing a lot of hiring this is the season and I'm involved this season with a lot of hiring very directly involved with a lot of hiring which is a lot of logistics

and a lot of being on campus, going to meetings, going to talks, going to lunches, going to dinners. And it's sort of stressing me out because I want to write and I can barely write.

And I basically have to put everything on hold and once this is over, like get back to writing. So I wrote this John McPhee article. I want to write 500 words a day. Just seem, let that add up. To me, seems quite ideal. So I look forward to doing that again soon.

In the meantime, I'm fitting in writing when I can, but I'm happy to be writing some real craft to be working on The Yorker to get a break from the proposals. Now, one thing I want to say about this busy period I'm in for the next few weeks at Georgetown, it's possible, I'm just going to warn everyone. It's possible that in the weeks ahead, there may be some weeks where you get some classic episodes of the podcast replayed from back before our audience got real big.

So classic episodes, most of you have not heard. There might be some classic episode replays as I try to figure out how to balance this temporarily really heavy workload. with the other things going on. And some of these weeks I might have to be on campus every single day and I'm thinking

instead of trying to squeeze in podcast recording on top of all of that that maybe there'll be a week or so in there in which we see some classic episodes. So if you see some classic episodes coming up,

that's what's going on. It's a frustrated writer doing a lot of meetings who is eager to get back to a quieter schedule, which is coming soon. And I'm excited about that.

You know, Jesse, it's interesting. comparison because I wrote about Brandon Sanderson the week before. And Sanderson writes like two or three thousand words a day. And McPhee does 500. So Sanderson will start writing the evening and write to two or three in the morning. And McPhee, I don't know, 500 words is probably two hours. You know, not nearly that much time.

So there's an interesting comparison. Now, Sanderson has to do that because he produces two books a year. and some of these books are three or four hundred thousand words long, and McPhee doesn't produce two books a year. But I can't help but notice. You look back, they're both, you know,

I've had a career for a while, McPhee a lot longer. They both seem pretty productive. But McPhee's thing seems a lot more sustainable to me. Yeah. Ferris talks about McPhee all the time on his podcast. Yeah, Ferris took his class at Princeton.

So McPhee teaches nonfiction writing at Princeton. And Ferris took the class. You know, Who else took that class was David Rimnick. Oh, really? Yeah. So that shows how old McPhee is. But yeah, so Rimnick, who's now the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, studied nonfiction writing under McPhee.

But anyways, I found that inspiring. I think McPhee has it dialed in. I read some of McPhee's writing book that he put out a couple years ago. Did he talk about the 500 pages in that? This is a, yeah, this is, I don't know if it came from that. You mean like draft number four? Yeah. Yeah.

This quote goes around every year. So it's how I open my post is like, oh, I know it's John McPhee's birthday because this quote goes around every year on his birthday. And I don't know where it's originally from. That's a good question. But he has this quote where he's like, people think I'm so prolific, but I rarely write more than 500 words a day. And look, if you just put an ounce in a bucket, you're going to get a quart. Like, so this famous quote goes around. But I appreciate that.

But to me, it underscores the power of slow productivity. Like that's personified, crystallized, refined slow productivity. an hour and a half to two hours a day, repeat for 50 years, and look back, and it's, you know, incredibly influential writer. There's nothing about busyness or franticness or exhaustion

that really has anything to do with impact over time. And yet we're often also frantic and busy and exhausted. And it's not because that's what's required for producing stuff of value. It's because it's just, it's so haphazard. Work is so haphazard. It's like, I don't know, you just stumble in the things. And like Brandon Sanderson talked about, you know, before the pandemic, he was traveling to speak or go to conferences a hundred plus days a year.

Which is crazy, right? That's why he wrote five books, extra books during the pandemic is because he couldn't travel. He's like, all right during those time. It was five extra books in a two-year period for not doing the traveling. He just sort of stumbled into it. People are asking them. He felt like it was the nice thing to do. you tell a story about you have to be connected to your fans.

You know, it's just you stumble into it. And McPhee is like one of the only people not to stumble into it. He's like, I don't know, leave me alone. I'm writing a book about oranges. Wendell Berry too. Wendell Berry and McPhee. Yeah, both. Wendell Berry's like, I don't care.

I'm with my horses plowing a field. And McPhee's like, I moved to Florida to write a book about oranges. And we all looked at that and our soul sings. Something about that appeals. It's because we're not wired for this arbitrary overload. But everything's so hapast. that we stumble into it. Now, Sanderson, to his credit,

finally had the epiphany. And again, this is where I want to emphasize. Sanderson is not Patrick Rufus. We said this last time. In the last episode, I messed it up last week. I know he did not write the name of the wind. I know that's not who that is. Okay.

But he's finally wised up where he discovered, wait a second, my storyline for why I'm traveling 100 plus days a year. is that I have to be connected to my fans. I have to be on their radar in order to foster these relationships and sell books. Now, I don't know if that's true. In genre writing, from what I understand is once you have an audience,

the most important thing is that you keep producing books so that, like, they never go too long before another one of your books come out. I don't think it's that important you connect to them. This is Neil Stevenson's thing. He's like, I don't go to conferences. I don't do any of this. I just make sure I have books coming out regularly. So I don't think he's right about that.

But to his credit, he at some point had the epiphysons. of, oh, I could use YouTube to do that and connect with a lot more fans. And I don't have to travel to these conferences and do these connections one on one. So Sanderson has gotten rid of the I'm going to go to 50 or 100 conferences a year. And instead is like we could just have a good YouTube studio and hire a team. And there could be a few videos a week. And actually, I'm going to be way more connected. My fans can, you know, hundreds of thousands of fans can see me and hear from me multiple times a week.

And I don't have to go to Orlando. So, like, I think, to his credit, he's realizing that he can have some more breathing room. How would you write your books in the past? It seems to me that you would probably take that 500 word example anyway. I just, I don't do it every day. So I schedule when I'm going to write each week and flex that based on my, what's going on that week and how close I am to finishing something or a deadline and I sort of schedule time in there. It's just harder now. You know, it's harder now.

I have more on my plate as a professor than I used to. It used to really just be teaching and research and had a lot of flexibility to work in writing. Because, hey, no one in the world of writing cared about me, so it's not like I had to go do things. And when you're a junior professor, you're protected from service because they want you focusing on your research. Now I'm a tenured professor. There's a lot more things, you know, on my plate that's not research or teaching, like the next. three weeks where I can barely do any thinking or writing. And as a writer, there's all these other stuff that people want and need from me.

So suddenly there's way more time commitments. And when I was writing deep work, there's no one bothering me about can you come on this show or send me some advice on this or come visit or talk over here. And now it's every day. Every day. Like, what about this? What's your opinion on this? Can we get coffee?

Can we get lunch? Like it's just it. So that's all constant. as well. It's a completely different situation. So now I'm envious of the McPhee model now more than I've ever been before of if you're just writing, it's 500 words a day. Then at certain points you have some editing and you have to do the research and thinking and interviews in the afternoons that that writing's based on. But that doesn't have to happen every afternoon. And then you just put those drops in the bucket and let the courts build up. You know, so anyways, I'm more envious of that now as it becomes harder and harder for me to find time. time to do the thing I do that's arguably way most impactful and most important. So it's this sort of weird, bizarre world. However, as a professor, it's all seasonal. So, like, right now I'm annoyed and stressed out.

But a month from now, well, a month and a half from now, I'm in summer and have zero work to do for Georgetown, pay my own salary. And I'm not teaching in the fall. And suddenly I have like a six month period where I can write all the time. So it balances. But that's where I am today. That's why I'm happy because I got to write today. And not a proposal, like real craft New Yorker writing.

When you said that you moved from coffee shop to coffee shop and you said you were an attic, were you talking about coffee or talking about moving locations? The coffee, yeah. I mean, I have to move, locate because I walk to think through, I write until I'm stuck, and then I write to think through the next thing I'm going to write. I write in my head and then I sit down and write. But I go back to coffee shops to do it because I want more injection of copious amounts of caffeine. We'll see.

Though we're building this, you know, this new library in our house. And the idea is that's going to be writing room. So in theory, it'll be like I write, walk, write, walk, write. Like, that'll be the room I come to, uh, to do all my writing. I'll be surrounded by books on my custom desk and I'm looking forward to that. You'll probably still do some writing in coffee shops too. I probably still will. Yeah.

I probably still will. You have another option. Yeah. I don't write here as much as I thought I would. I mean, sometimes I come here in the evening. to write blog posts and stuff, but it's, you know,

like the bar downstairs really gets rock and rolling. It's like pretty loud. It can sometimes smell weird here. Like it's not, I never, I haven't furnished it properly yet. So I mean,

I like the idea of my library at home being a core, a core writing spot once that's done being done. We'll shoot some videos there once it's done. So we'll introduce it. We'll introduce it to the crowd. We also have to shoot some videos of the HQ. I mean,

there's a lot. We got to show people. So that's all, that's all coming. All right. Well, this is a lot of just me babbling. just being reflective about the world of writing,

but that's what those writers do. Let's do a couple of quick sponsors and get into the listener calls we're going to answer today. The first sponsor is My Body Tudor. I talked about them on Monday's episode. This is an online coaching service for health and fitness. You get an online coach who makes a plan for you

about what you're going to eat and how you're going to exercise and then you check in every day with that coach. Is that accountability and the consistency see that that breeds is how you get results is why my body tutor is so popular is that it works. It gets you to actually do the things you need to get. I've messed around with my body tutor, and the thing I wanted to emphasize is they have a fantastic custom interface or check it in with your coach every day.

You have an app on your phone where you can, for example, just take pictures of the food you eat and it timestamps it. And then at the end of the day, you can add some notes about it so you can submit really easily all the food you eat and there's a box right in there where you type in what exercise you did. So it's really easy using this app to the report in every day, everything you ate, the exercise you did, and you get feedback from your coach every day. This really is the right way. If you want to get healthy, you want to get in shape, you need someone to help you along the way. My Body Tudor makes that possible. As mentioned on Monday, the good news is that they are

going to give $50 off the first month to our listeners. Just mention deep questions when you sign up. And it will give you that $50 off. You could do that at my body tutor.com. Tudor spelled T-U-Tudor. MyBodytudor.com and mention deep questions. I also want to briefly mention Blinkist, longtime sponsor of the show. So you know how Blinkist works

as I talk about it all the time. You subscribe to Blinkets. It's a subscription service. And it gives you 10 to 15 minutes summaries that they call Blinks of some of the most important best nonfiction books out there today. It is a very quick way to get brought up the speed quickly on what's this book about, what's that book about. You can read the blinks or you can

listen to them, which is an amazingly useful feature. I like to use it to vet new books. Sometimes I listen to a blink. I learn all I need to know about that book. Now I can file that away. Sometimes I listen to a blink, I say, oh, I absolutely have to read it. To make that concrete, That's how I worked my way through Yuval Harare's follow-ups to Sapiens, homodeos and 21 lessons for the 21st century. No idea what those were about. And I used Blinks to figure out, do I need to read it or not? So I ended up buying 21 lessons for the 21st century, but not Homo Deos.

Blinks helped me figure out which of those I needed to read and which ones I didn't. So obviously, ideas are power in our current world. The best ideas come from books. Blinkist helps you now. navigate that world of nonfiction books. So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, and you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial, Blinkist.com slash deep. All right, it's a listener calls episode. So we are going to answer your calls. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast for instructions on how to submit these voice calls. All right, Jesse. I think we have five good calls on the docket.

What's our first? Our first call is about a professional worker going to a training, want your advice on how to approach it. Hi, Cal. My name is Spencer, and I'm a security engineer and information security officer. I would like to know how to best tackle a training opportunity I have coming up in two months. In two months, I get to take a week-long security training course that's about eight hours a day and pretty intense. Some people call it the experience of learning security through a fire hose. I've reviewed the syllabus for the course and I've started reading a chapter a day on some of the topics in the syllabus,

but I still want to get the most out of this training experience. How do I stay engaged when I have four eight-hour days in a row of really deep learning? This is also in an area that I'm not as comfortable with. Any tips and tricks would be helpful. Thank you. It's a good question. I'm going to actually go back and draw from advice I used to give to college students to help give you some guidance about this particular endeavor.

Now, first, I'm going to recommend not reading those chapters in advance. I'm going to assume unless they tell you to, I'm going to assume in a training like this, the idea is they're going to give you the information you need during those lectures backstopped by the textbooks. So it's not going to be, we assume you know all these things. Now let's build on that in these lectures.

Most of these type of trainings is we're going to be giving you the information from these chapters of these textbooks. So it's probably an unnecessary investment of your time to read those things in advance. So the question is, what you do during the actual what are you doing the actual training? We just break something. Off, by the way, off scenes,

Jesse just ripped the microphone off the stand. So I'm going to say he's really mad about this training. I think it screws in. He's to have to find a right way to turn it. He was so mad about the idea of the security training that he ripped the microphone off the stand. Look, I'm going to switch to his camera. He doesn't know I'm doing this.

There he is, trying to fix the viewers of the YouTube channel can see the devastation Jesse has wreaked. All right. Anyways, Jesse's protest notwithstanding, what I'm going to recommend is that you approach this with the question resolution method I used to teach the college student. So the idea is they have all this information coming at you. You should have printed out in advance.

If they're giving you a detailed syllabus or detailed notes, have that all print it out in advance as your guide for what you're going through. And if you're supposed to take notes, you know, take notes as they're talking. but the most important thing is to mark every topic for which you did not fully understand what they said. Do you have a syllabus printed out, you can actually just put a question mark next to those topics in the syllabus, incredibly efficient. Otherwise, if you're typing notes, you just very big, bold question mark or the word question in caps, this thing here. I didn't quite understand that. So then when you're done with a session for the day, you have notes on the stuff that made sense and you have question marks next to the stuff.

that didn't make sense. And your goal is to fill in those questions as quickly as possible, talking to the instructor, going back to the chapter. This is what I'm always telling college kids. The goal is making sure that you understand what you don't understand and you fill in that understanding as soon as possible. And that's what I'm going to recommend here.

So it's all about your capture information, fire hose, fire hose, great. But make sure you mark the stuff that does not make sense when it first comes at you. And then as soon as possible after the lecture, try to fill in that gap. Then you will come away from this training, having at least at some point understood everything in the training.

That's where you want to be. Now you can, if you need to study for an exam later, you're starting from a foundation of having known everything. Studying should be reviewing things you already know, not learning things from scratch. You don't need to study for an exam. You'll have a good basis in all these topics so that if you have to review it in the future.

Again, you're starting from a foundation. Have you understood that at some point? You're not trying to learn it from scratch. So that's the main thing I would recommend. And beyond that, just take it easy, you know, eat well, drink. A lot of water. Don't do any other intellectually demanding work outside of those trainings during those days.

Rest. I mean, make it clear that that's your primary thing you're doing. All right. You're back in action. Jesse, the microphone's back and running. What do we got for a second question here? All right. Next question.

That's funny. Thanks you for rescuing me there. We have a question from Richard about your business model. Hi, Cal. This is Richard from California. I love the podcast and have read me. any of your books. Thanks for all you do. I have a question about your business model. I'm wondering, I know you have a full-time job as a professor, but you are doing all these activities, writing books,

podcasts, speaking, articles for the New Yorker. Do you have a overall business model behind this? Is there something that you are mainly focusing on? Or are these simply activities that you're doing because, you're interested in them and of course you don't want to lose money on them. So I'm wondering, is everything a support to your book publishing or is there some bigger empire building plan behind it? Love to hear more and whatever you can tell us would be appreciated. So Richard, there is a plan and I do think a lot about this and I tweak and adjust this over time. Sometimes I think about, I think about what's going on in my writing career. I'll use a Jim Collins flywheel metaphor. So if you know his flywheel metaphor that was originally introduced

and good to great, it's a, you're trying to make your business into a, like a flywheel that it picks up momentum. And as you go around this flywheel, it turns faster and faster. So it builds upon itself. Positive stuff builds upon itself. And that's the key to having something goes somewhere interesting. And I often think about my writing business that way. So at the top of the flywheel, the core thing, the foundation of my writing business is my writing. Books and New Yorker. And New Yorker was a great simplification of lots of different places I used to write.

For now, as long as they'll have me, I like the idea of just this is where I focus, for the most part, my non-book writing. So books in New Yorker, blockbuster book releases, attention-catching beautifully crafted articles. That's the core grist for my writing business mill. I think without that, nothing else really matters. Then you're just like an online marketer or influencer or something. That's the foundation. Okay. Then next, if you go around the flywheel, I have this, think of it as like the online platform, the online business, the other online activities that happen.

So people find their way to these other online activities, which is at this point primarily my email newsletter, my podcast and the associated videos. They find their way there because they've read my books. They've read my articles. But then they go there and we can interact with that audience and build relationships with the audience. We can also pull more people into that audience who maybe haven't seen my books or haven't read my article. So then we have this online, it's the podcast newsletter video. And then that all fuels what I call just my deep life. So making my life interesting as deep as possible.

You get flexibility with like the income that these things bring in, the opportunities that bring in. You can make your life more interesting. And that fuels back into, that actually feels back into the flywheel. And I maybe have these out of order. Let me think. I think the way I normally think about it is. a, the books doing really well allows more flexibility and interesting things to happen in my life, makes my life deeper. I think it's the way I normally think about it.

And my life being more interesting and deeper feeds into my online platforms and makes that more interesting because it makes it more interesting to hear from me or to see me. And that online platform, as that grows, it allows my books to be bigger, which then flywheels back around to my life getting more interesting and I have more options, which makes the platform bigger. That's the actual way. So I had that ordering wrong, Richard. So that's the actual flywheel I see. So the book fuels more interesting deeper life. And the more interesting deeper life fuels the online platform. The online platform means the books can be bigger.

That makes an even bigger, more deeper, interesting life, which makes the platform even bigger, which makes the books even bigger. That's a classic Jim Collins flywheel. And that's the way I think about these things feeding into each other. Now, in terms of time, I'm very careful about this. So as I've talked about here on the show, I separate writing from non-writing. The writing is a core thing and it's seasonal. When I'm working on a book or an article, it's getting time.

There's times where I'm not writing something. But it's a core time that I protect on my calendar and that's at the core of my business. The other stuff, the other recording the podcast, writing the newsletter, working on the logistics. Right now I try to keep that to roughly like a long half day. And just you can confirm. It's like roughly a half day. Like I got here today at 1030 and I don't know what time it is now, but I think we're aiming for like 2.30. We're done here today, right?

And so podcast recording, working with Jesse on anything we need to do for the podcast, video, talking to our video people, talking to our sound engineer, like all of that stuff. I want to be in basically a half day once a week. And that's my fixed schedule productivity setup. I want to do the best I can with that half day. So I'm very aggressively and ambitiously trying to push things forward, but it has to fit within that with that confine. So maybe it's a little bit of a slower pace than if my whole time was spent on the podcast, on the video and the newsletter and all these type of things. But it's still making forward progress and its footprint is contained.

So I keep that footprint really contained. Then there's a few other ancillary income producing things. There's talks on my online courses. I'm very careful about spending time on those. And I don't spend aggregated over the year. I spend not that much time on those. Like right now I'm not doing much talking. It's a new as a busy semester.

And I had my half days for the podcast video newsletter. And I had some writing to do. And I knew had a lot of busy semester. So I'm not doing much talking. Like I just told, I tell my speaking agents, turn off the spigot, you know, for now, right? So I've significantly reduced the writing. And the online courses, Scott Young and I have two. And we release, we release them twice a year.

and I'll add it. When we add new courses, it'll usually be over a summer and we only do that every, God knows, not very long, right? Like one of our courses we built in 2014 and the other

we built during the pandemic, but it's very, I'm very careful about when I invest time in that. And then we do the launches twice a year and that's it. So those things are very careful about. I don't want to spend too much time on those things. The reason why I spend any time on those things is, again,

the income feeds into the making your life deeper. And making your life deeper, makes the platform more interesting, which makes the books more interesting. So that's part of the flywheel. Those things are like someone running up and giving an extra push to it. So that's the way I see it. And so just to summarize the key points here is I do have a flywheel.

Two, writings at the core of it. Three, I'm incredibly careful about the time footprints I allow for the non-writing stuff. And that's all very constrained. And I don't know what number of on now. Four or D. I'll just switch the letters. really income in this picture is all about flexibility, remarkability,

interestingness, and not just scorecarding income. Like to me, that's, it's entirely utility. Like, the fact that I make enough money on my books means, for example,

I don't have to take summer salary from research grants. So my summers are mine. I pay my own salary so I can do whatever I want. I owe, you know, I'm not working for Georgetown in the summer. And that's really important for me, right?

That's money opening up autonomy that allows me to do cooler things. The income from this podcast right now, like a lot of the income from this podcast goes to making the deep work HQ possible, which I think is like an interesting part of my deep life. Like having this HQ and being able to come here and we have different plans for what we want to do with this space. Like that's interesting and deep and remarkable. That's what I care about. Not can I, I don't know, buy a car with podcast money or something like that. That's the other thing I see because I think as my life gets more deeper and interesting, it makes what I do on a show like this or in our videos or my newsletter more interesting.

And that means more people are engaging with me, which means when I write a book, more people want to write the book. And the books generate a lot of money. So then we can make the life even more remarkable, more interesting, you know? Like there's things on the table where if I want to take a half sabbatical, for example, or take a sub. This is insider baseball. But basically, like when you have a sabbatical, it pays for one semester.

but you can spread it over two semesters and take half salary for those two semesters. And when people do that, it's usually because they're going to, like, go to Google for the work on research and the company will fill in the rest of their salary. But, like, now I could have the option of doing that and just filling in the half salary with book money and just spending a whole year writing. Like, those type of things to me are very important. Being able to have the summers to myself, those type of things are very important, et cetera. So that's the business model. turning that flywheel and everything in that flywheel

keeps coming back to making my life deeper more interesting and more focused and everything keeps coming back to that and everything's aimed at that and as that gets is that's accomplished more the rest of the flywheel turns rest of the flywheel turns more and more

and that's the that's the goal all right Richard so that's that's the business model and and it's earned me literally dozens of dollars dozens of dollars a month.

I just drink a second cup of coffee, three cups of coffee. I don't even have to worry about that cost, man. This is with all of our podcast money. Jesse knows. Jesse,

you will confirm. I've drawn the flywheel on a whiteboard for you before. Yeah. You know I talk about the flywheel. Yeah. Quite a bit. The scary thing is what's going to happen

if the flywheel keeps picking up speed? If it all comes back to like making my life more deeper and focused on more remarkable, eventually that might lead to some pretty radical things. You might have to buy a remarkable tablet. That's where it's all, the flywheel is all aimed at buying a remarkable tablet. Then you can have a life like them. That's the story right there.

Yes, exactly. I want a remarkable tablet that I would be very well dressed on a balcony, looking pensively out over the ocean and then writing poetry on a remarkable tablet. That's where this all leads, Richard. That's where this all leads. So anyways, oh, and let me caveat out this all that I'm very bad at business And so don't use my

Don't use anything I'm saying as like an example Of how you should run things Because I have negative business instinct All right, there we go. Let's see here. That's two questions. We're on the number three. All right, sir, what do we got for number three?

Okay, next question. We have a question about New Year's resolutions. I know it's a couple of months. pass then, but he's got some good points here. And he talks about going back to his guiding documents. So be interested to hear what you think about that. Hey, Cal, this is Matt. I'm a private wealth advisor in Texas. Really enjoy the podcast. I'm on your fourth book right now. And I have a question, given that it's the start of a new year, how would you recommend to someone who is, let's just say,

relatively new to time block planning and to some of your ideas, how would you recommend that they go about tackling New Year's resolutions in conjunction with coming up with the guiding document for their personal life and also for their professional lives? And then how they would then work through goals related to the four or five Cs, then distill those down into quarterly plans, and then how frequently should one be checking these kind of overarching guiding documents and annual plans so that they can feel like they are staying true to these overarching principles and goals, but being able to action them on a quarterly basis and then down into a weekly basis. Thanks so much.

Really appreciate it. So Matt, I'm going to try to simplify some of what you're talking about. out here. And so maybe that'll help. I'm going to reduce the number of documents. I'm going to try to reduce friction here a little bit. So at the, at the core of all of this is my multi-scale time management strategy. And again, for people who are new to my strategy, watch the time management core ideas video on my YouTube channel. So that's YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. Go to the core ideas playlist, play the video on time management. And I get into this in detail. But when I'm talking about my time management system, there's this one part where I say you should be doing multi-scale planning, which is daily, weekly, quarterly planning.

So let's start with that. So each day, your time block plan your day. When you build that time block plan, you're referencing your weekly plan that you write at the front of each week, which helps you figure out what you should be doing that day. When you write that weekly plan each week, you are checking out your quarterly plan, which is aiming you towards your bigger picture. or initiatives or any types of habits or heuristics or strategies that you're running during that quarter and then you update that quarterly plan every quarter. I'm going to suggest that these different planning documents you're talking about that exist above this scale, these annual plans, these guiding documents that for the most part, for now Matt, integrate them into your

quarterly plan. So you can have a quarterly plan for your work and a quarterly plan for your life outside of work. Just have at the top of the plan. And if you're using something like Google Docs or some such, put it in like a box frame, like a box frame, like a a one-cell table to differentiate it. I think visual matters. And you have this sort of bigger picture plan right there at the top of your quarterly plan documents. So you know what?

You see it just every quarter when you work on your quarterly plan. You see that annual plan, like what you're working on that year, what's important to you. Then when you build your plan for that quarter, it's based on that. And then you just see it. And you don't have to worry about it's not a separate document. So when it comes to something like New Year's resolutions, that's just going to go into naturally those bigger picture plans, that bigger picture annual picture. So you're just going to see that every single week when you build your weekly plan.

And then when you update your quarterly plan every quarter, you might seriously rejigger that annual plan. That's how I would suggest to simplify things, Matt. So you just have those quarterly planning documents that influence weekly, influence daily. That's much simpler. And that's the way I largely describe it in that time management video. The one guiding document, though, that you probably do want to keep separate is a values document. This is a much more timeless.

These are the values by which I run my life. I like to have that as a separate document. And I would suggest you review that every week. So when you do your weekly plan, I just think it should be more precious. And if you want to print it and put it in like a laminated folder type thing, so you have a physical copy you can take out and look at, I think that's not a bad idea. And that's just good. I do it on Fridays at the end of the week.

Just remind yourself what you're all about. I think that's important and that's important to be in its own document. But annual plans, any type of guiding plans that persist on a scale beyond the quarter, throw them at the top of the quarterly plan. Yes, they're not going to change much from quarter to quarter, but you're going to see them a lot and it's going to sear in. So that's what I'd recommend. And so your New Year's resolutions just exist in that ecosystem.

It's nothing special. You don't have to do something special for it. It's just a tweet to your annual plan, gets reflected in the quarterly plans, gets reflecting your weekly plans, gets reflected in your time block plans, gets reflected in what you're doing right now in this very moment. It all links together.

All right. Before we got a couple more questions here. But we also have a couple more sponsors that keep my flywheel turning, keep the show running, keep the Deep Work HQ open. And my life more deep and remarkable and it all connects together. Let's talk briefly here about longtime sponsor Grammarly. You've heard me say it. You know it's true. Clarity and communication is everything, especially in the world of work.

We take it for granted because we have to write so much. Despite my best efforts, we spend so much time through the emails and text messages and SlackChass that we're constantly communicating. And being clear, having the right tone, all of that is important. And it's hard to get right, given how much we actually write. This is where Grammarly Premium enters the scene. If you subscribe to Grammarly Premium, this is an app that can look at all the different things you write in and all the different devices you write on and help that writing be what

you want it to be. We're not talking just spelling and grammar check fixes here. We're talking about much more complex things like tone adjustments and tone detection. Here's the tone of this email you're reading. I don't think it's what you think it is. Here are some suggestions about how you can change this tone to be what you want it to be. Full sentence rewrite. So I was just messing around with this, and it is amazing. You'll come back and say, maybe you should write this whole sentence this way. A lot less ambiguous, a lot more clear. When you're writing with grammarly, premium, it's like you have a professional editor looking over your shoulder. And this seems like a small thing, but it's not because it means every communication you have with a boss or a colleague

or a client. You come across as sharper and smarter and more on the ball. And that's going to accrue to be real benefits for you and your career. So there's a reason why Gramerly has been a long-time sponsor because I'm a huge fan of writing and communication. They help you do that better. So you can get through those emails and you'll work quicker by keeping it concise, confident, and effective with Gramerly. Go to Grammarly.com slash deep to sign up for a free account. When you're ready to upgrade to Gramerly Premium,

you will get 20% off just for being my listener. To get that 20% off, you have to sign up at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash deep. Let's also talk about workable. Workable being an amazing tool. for hiring people. Now we talked about it. Justin and I talked about this on Monday

about how our preferred hiring method of trapping people in literal nets is probably not the right way to go about things and how workable offers you a much better way of doing it. Here's how it works. First, it helps you find the candidates by posting your listing to all the top job boards with a 200 total with just one quick.

But then, and this really speaks to me, they make the process of dealing with those candidates It's much more time efficient. You get tools like video interviews and e-signatures. It helps you automate tasks like scheduling the interviews so that you're not drowning in the shallow work of the interview process and can focus on the deep work of actually talking to the candidates who are going to make a difference in your company.

So whether you're hiring for your coffee shop or your engineering team, workable is exactly what you need to hire the right people fast. Right, here's the exciting news. You can start hiring today with a 15-day, free trial. And if you end up hiring someone during that free trial, it remains free. You're not charged for that. To go to workable.com slash podcast to start hiring.

Workable is hiring made easy. Better than using nets. All right, Jesse, I think we have time for a couple more quick calls. Who do we have next? Next question. We have a question about writing non-technical stuff. Hey, Cal, my name is Abyshek. I've been following your writing since the Google Reader days.

Thanks for all the advice over the years. My question is about getting better at writing. I've read William Zinzer's On Writing Well, and I've read The Elements of Style by Ed Strump and White. This has really helped me write better technical documents in my work. I also read widely. However, I want to write better blog, posts, and articles that are not as technical. I want to emulate the writing styles of some of my favorite authors.

What is the process I should follow in learning the way other authors write? How do I learn to reproduce the feeling I get from reading their work? Do I dissect grammar and composition? Can you recommend a book or training that goes into this? The author I want to emulate, in this case, is Bill Bellevue. He primarily writes about nature, and his writing makes me feel very peaceful and relaxed. I'd love to be able to write like him. I remember you talking about doing this with their own writing career.

How did you go about it? I love to hear your thoughts. Thanks. Well, Abashik, there's two things I'd recommend when it comes to improving nonfiction writing. One, yes, dissect. dissect the authors that you want to emulate and try to replicate their formula in your own writing. Now, down the line, this will evolve into your own style, but that is deliberate practice for style development. As you referenced, I did this back when I was first emerging as a nonfiction writer.

I was trying to understand the then kind of new of a quite popular nonfiction pop science style of idea writing. So I would dissect Malcolm Gladwell. I remember dissecting Clive Thompson, maybe some Stephen Johnson. But I would take articles and I would break it down. And I would figure out like, okay, here are the sections. And then what happens in each section? You know, opening story with a cliffhanger transition, idea, introduction, back to opening story. Like, I'd really break these things down.

And then I would try to emulate that in articles I was writing. So great. I am now going to take this style of this article. I broke down the formula. I'm going to now try to write my own article that follows that formula. That's how you actually begin to grow those muscles, see what works. See what doesn't work. It's practice with direction.

It's what makes practice deliberate and not just repetitious. You know, who used to do this famously was Ben Franklin. When Ben Franklin was learning how to write, he would take essays or poetry and would break them down to their component parts and then try to replicate it from scratch. So he really had a mimic style way of learning because he had no other way of learning how to write. He was a printist to his brother's printing shop in Boston and wanted to become a writer. So he would just literally break down and reconstruct other people's writing. And then he started writing anonymous letters for his brother's newspaper in the name of characters. His brother didn't know it was him.

But he was at that point able to apply what he learned. And he was a pretty good mimic. And that's where he really developed his style. So I think it's a really effective tactic. So I would definitely recommend you do that. The second thing is, if at all possible, you want to write for editing. There is a difference in the deliberate practice effect between writing something that someone's going to look at and potentially say, nope, and it's not good, we're going to reject it or edit it heavily versus writing for your own blog or writing your own journal. And this is what I did.

So when I was deconstructing Gladwell, when I was deconstructing Thompson or Johnson, it wasn't for blog post. I actually went out and found an online magazine that had editing, but I could, they need a content. So I was like, I'm just good enough to get pieces in here. But they'll reject them if they're not good. And they're serious. It was like a serious writer. It was like a serious writer. It was like a series.

It was called Flack magazine. I think it eventually closed down. But I had real editors and they were open to submissions. And there was a period of two years where that was where my writing energy was going. I believe this was primarily between my second book, How to Become a Straight A Student, and my third book, how to become a high school superstar.

It was between those two periods, which is why Superstar actually reads like, what if Malcolm Gladwell wrote a college admissions book? Because I was doing this training, and I was focused on this magazine, not because they had a big audience, not because anyone ever saw those articles, but because I was deconstructing writers I admired,

then pitching an article to Flack, and then when they'd accept that pitch, I would write that article in a direct emulation of a style and article is deconstructing. Because I was writing for editing it pushed me harder to make that better.

The stakes were higher. And then I take another article and I was like, let me try this format. So I pitched an article that allowed me to practice that format. And then I would practice that format.

And that's how I built up my initial nonfiction idea writing chops. It was through exactly that practice. So that's my two piece of recommendation. Dissect writers, emulate their style, if possible,

do that emulation for editing. so that you have that pressure and feedback to try to stretch yourself and make that writing as good as possible. And thank you, by the way, for being such a long-time reader. The Google Reader days, those are some of my favorite days. 2007, 2008. It was like the study hacks blog,

and you had your RSS reader. And I liked that day. This was before social media had taken over the Internet, and it was, like, interesting people with interesting blogs, and you would curate them in your RSS feed and see their articles that came in. And I remember back then being big on like the minimalist bloggers.

This is when Leo Babuda and Zen Habibhutah and Zen Habits. This was before the fire movement but I'm trying to think there's some other bloggers like that. People who were doing interesting radical experiments in their life

and they'd write these essays about it and it was also personal and interesting and creative and I just think there was like a high point. Early web 2.0 was this great high point of web production and then five years later all that got reduced to Facebook post and Instagram things.

And we kind of lost that moment. So thanks for the memory of Shake. I miss and remember that time fondly. Okay, let's try to do one more question, Jesse. What do we got here? Okay. The next question we got is about deep procrastination with students and nonsense. Hi, Cal.

What advice would you give to people grappling with deep procrastination? And specifically, how does that advice change between students, and professionals. I work with both, and I think knowing how you would approach the question differently between students and professionals might give some additional insight into the idea. Thanks. All right, so deep procrastination is an interesting, complicated topic. So deep procrastination is a term I coined back in those halcyon days of my study hacks blog and all were just writing for RSS feeds. And I was mainly doing student advice.

And it described the phenomenon that I would see frequently, which would be undergraduates at these elite schools. So I was at MIT at the time, but I would also work with some students at Harvard and other nearby schools. Students at elite schools losing their capability of doing schoolwork, like completely losing the capability to the point where they would have to do leaves of absences, right? Because it would be your final paper is due and you just couldn't do it. And your professor would say, okay, well, look, I'll give you a week.

extension and you just want to do a lick of work. Like you just lost the ability to do schoolwork. And I called that deep, deep procrastination. And typically where that came from for students was a fritzing out or a burning out of their cognitive motivational systems. And so you usually would have two ingredients that would come together that caused this. Extrinsic motivation. So they were just high achievers, just you got to get good grades, grinds. for grades, you know, to get the good college, grind for grades, like do three majors and take on all these clubs and grind through so you'll be impressive as you can get the right job.

Just kind of like extrinsent motivation of just my family in town think I'm talented and I got to do impressive things. So it's not coming deeply from an intrinsic place. You have extrinsic motivation and then you combine it with difficulty. Like, is this hard? It's this cognitive toil. Like the work is just really hard. You're doing a lot of, you have a lot of majors, a lot of clubs. It's really mentally demanding.

and you're at MIT trying to do two majors, and it's really difficult, right? When those two things come together, extrinsic motivation plus a consistent toil, cognitive toil, you can fritz out the system and your mind's like no more, no moss.

We're not going to work anymore. And that would cause deep procrastination. It's important to try to differentiate this from depression. They're similar, but it's not quite the same thing. So with depression, it's much more broad in its impact.

So with depression, which also, of course, is common among students, especially at these elite schools, you go adenic. So you can't imagine finding pleasure or happiness in anything. That's why depression is so insiduous.

Deep procrastination is more focused. Like, you're still other things in your life you're really into. You just, like, can't do the schoolwork. Like, in fact, you might be things you really love doing.

You're like, I don't know, I'm reading instead and going to these movies and why am I even in school? and you still have motivation and you still can find pleasure in life. You just can't do schoolwork. Whereas depression is more of a fritzing out of the entire ability to have optimism or hope or feel like you're ever going to enjoy anything ever again.

And depression tends to come more from, you go through a period of heavy negative self-talking and rumination. So there's sort of a different path to depression that you're down on yourself, down on yourself obsessing over like things going on in your life that are bad. and that conversation was bad and on bad. And again, there's overlap here, but it's typically frits out your, the pleasure centers,

the ability to have any happiness or optimism gets fritzed out by heavy rumination where deep procrastination was very specifically schoolwork. Again, they can overlap if you're depressed. You're not able to do schoolwork. But if you, if you have optimism and enjoy things your life,

just can't do the schoolwork. That's deep procrastination. All right. So there are two different things. When it was clearly deep procrastination, for students, the key was to, reduce both of those instigating factors.

Extrinsic motivation, large cognitive toil. It's just physically really demanding the cognitive work you're trying to do. So this is where I started writing about at first the Zen valedictorian philosophy on my blog, and then later the Romantic Scholar philosophy, which was all about taking your college career, moving the locus of control from the extrinsic into the spectrum back to the intrinsic. So you take back control of what you're studying and why. And then reducing, changing, and modifying your approach to the schoolwork.

So it's not nearly as the, it's not a toil. So you get rid of that negative affect, the friction of actually doing the work. You make your work easier. Intrific motivation make the work easier. Deep procrastination goes away because those are the two things to cause it. Now, again, if it's depression, you need clinical health. There's a whole different way you deal with depression. But it's just deep procrastination.

That would be my cure for people who had it. It would also be my preventative for people who worried about it. And this is where I would have people, for example, take control over what they major in. And I didn't care how they made the decision, but just so it was theirs and not their parents or not something I think would impress their aunts and uncles at the family reunions. This is where I would get the students to be very heavy on lifestyle-centric career planning, where they put out a vision of their life one year after college, five years after college, 15 years after college, that resonates with them deeply. I live here. This is what my days are like. here's the role of work, here's the activities I'm involved with.

Like they can taste and feel and smell what this lifestyle is like. And then they're working backwards from that to figure out, like what should I be doing in school now to help move me closer to that? Right. So now you do those things. Now it's intrinsic motivation. The work you're doing as part of this vision you created that resonates with you. Motivation's intrinsic.

Now they get rid of the overwhelming just toil of the work. I say, and again, I tell these students they get in again, get rid of all these stupid majors. get rid of all these stupid activities. You have this mindset that somehow there's going to be an admissions officer in your future that's going to say, this looks like a really hard schedule. You are very impressive for doing that hard schedule. You get to have this job. I'll tell them, no one cares. Like, where'd you go to school?

What do you major and what are your grades? That's about all I care about. So get rid of all these majors. Just have one major. Make your schedule easy. Compliment the required courses for your major with very different style of courses and easy courses. if you have all these, like all these kids did, advance standing credits from AP courses or whatever,

use them to take less courses, do independent studies, like make your schedule easy, so you have more than enough time to work. I used to go give talks at colleges back in the day where I had this student named Tov, and he was my case study, and I would show his calendar,

because he used the time machine function on his Mac to go back and show me a calendar from a typical day and was full of junk. He had all these majors and activities. He was so stressed out. And I would tell the story, about how he ended up drastically simplifying his life, and I would cut to his current calendar. And it went from a kaleidoscope of colored appointments to mainly white space, course, course,

low schedule, basically no extracurricular jobs, and how he just came alive once he had breathing room. And so I would say you make your life easier. And then once you have more than enough time to handle the work you're doing, use good time management, use good study techniques, you're spreading it out, you're not staying up late, you feel like you can easily control it. And then I have people invest okay, go to talks, buy books, like get really into your major subject so that your mind begins to think about this as something you care about and it's not just a means doing it.

You do all these things. You don't worry about deep procrastination. And so that was deep procrastination for students. That was this cause. That was my suggestion. The same thing applies, I think, for the professional world. And again, we differentiate between depression and deep procrastination. In the professional world, deep procrastination is,

hey, I run this company and I just can't do the work. I know this thing is due. I got to get this report to the client. I got to whatever. I just can't do it. But I have all these other plans and I'm daydreaming about what I wish I could do instead. And I'm daydream. I'm reading a lot of Tim Ferriss.

And like this is all a sign that it's deep procrastination, not depression. Okay. So what do you have to do? You got to solve those two problems. So you got to get the motivation back to intrinsic, which means what's your lifestyle-centric career vision, work backwards and reshape your working life to be aimed towards that. Now you're in control to get rid of the. a toil. The biggest cause of toil for professional jobs is chronic overload. You have more on

your plate than you can easily imagine getting done. If you go back and watch my core idea video on slow productivity, you can find it at YouTube.com slash Kalimaport Media. I'll get into this, but basically if you have chronic overload, it's a huge drain on your brain. So do less. Take stuff off your plate. Switch from push the pole. I will pull something new on my plate when I'm ready for it. You can't just push on my plate. Drastically change your work if you have to so that you have a reasonable amount of stuff to work on at any one time. Get rid of the chronic overload and then apply good habits, time block planning, weekly planning, quarterly planning, full capture, organized, to do systems, the low-hanging fruit to get rid of that extra friction. Do those things.

So your work is now oriented towards a vision that you believe in and resonates and you reduce the actual difficulty of your work by getting rid of overload and being smart about your habits. that's how you get back. That's how you get around deep procrastination. The same thing that work for students, I think works really well for professionals. So I'm glad you asked this question because I think it's a really interesting impact. It gets confused with other mental health issues, but it's very focused. And I think it has a really clear solution. And so I'm glad to have a chance to actually review those ideas.

All right. Well, I think that's all the time. Yeah, we're at an hour now. So that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, everyone who sent in your. voice questions. If you liked what you heard, you will like what you read in my weekly newsletter at calnewport.com. You'll also like what you see. Video of this full episode and videos of each individual question I answered today can be found at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media.

We'll be back on Monday. And until then, as always, stay deep.