Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 189: Why Did The Times Drop Twitter?

Episode Date: April 11, 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/calnewportmediaCal Reacts to the News: The Times Drops Twitter [4:21]QUESTIONS:- Is the hyperactive hive mind ever beneficial? [26:52]- How do I survive a really busy week? [36:49]- Should I quit my executive job to write a book?  [42:48]- Do you have suggestions for improving the trade-off between teaching vs. scholarship obligations? [54:11]- How do you approach complexity? [57:34]Thanks to our Sponsors:MyBodyTutor.comExpressVPN.com/DeepWorkable.com/PodcastGrammarly.com/DeepThanks 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 189. I'm here in the Deep Work HQ, along with my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm not in great shape, as I've told you. I'm still battling a sickness. My family was passing around. You probably hear it in my voice. So our goal is to get through today's episode and Thursday's episode,

which we're recording back to back without me losing my voice or passing out. Now, if the latter thing happens just, you got to just jump in heroically and just push to show through. I'll mimic your voice and I'll finish off the podcast. You got to mimic my voice and finish off the podcast. I'll sit in your chair and I'll put you over on the floor. Just prop me up. Prop me up in a blonde wig like a weekend at Bernie's thing.

When you talked about the scarecrow, that's what I'll do. Exactly. Yeah. There'll be a Cal scare or a Jesse Scarecrow. You'll have to do the voice when we cut to it, your own voice. And then for me, yeah, and I'm easy to imitate. Just deep, deep, deep, email, email, email, Facebook bad. You misunderstand deep work. Blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, easy to do. All right. So speaking of the show, quick administrative announcement about YouTube. We're changing something up about our YouTube channel, YouTube.com. slash Cal Newport Media. We are going to post fewer videos. So the original idea was that we were posting not just the full episodes in video format on YouTube. We were also posting an individual video for every question and segment. It turns out that from the perspective of people who use YouTube, that's way too many videos. So now what we're going to do is still release the video for the full episode of every episode that we record, along with a handful of videos of individual

questions or segments that seemed particularly interesting. It turns out there's two class of people that interact with this show on YouTube. There's people, this was the audience we had in mind at first, who listened to it on the podcast, but maybe occasionally there's a particular question they liked the answer for. And they wanted to go back and be able to find it and share it so they could go to the YouTube channel to find and share that question. And then there's this other group of YouTube users, which seems to be by far the bigger group that we didn't realize this at the time, of people who just prefer to use YouTube to consume the podcast.

And so for that second group, they were just being completely overwhelmed by having every question turned into a video. And so we decided to serve them because for the people who want to occasionally go and find a question I answered, Jesse has put these very good, what are they called chapters? Yeah. Yeah. So if you look at the description of the video of each full episode, every question is written

in the description with a link. And you can click on that link to jump straight to that part of the video. And then if you do that, the URL is now, if I understand this right, Jesse, the URL now has that time up in it. So if you share that URL with someone or you bookmarked that URL, you were bookmarking the video starting at exactly that point. So it turns out the full video with good chaptering solve that problem of occasionally people listening on the podcast app would want to go just bookmark a particular question while having fewer videos overall means that for those who like to just listen to the podcast online, they're not having the episodes be buried in all these individual question emails. Also, I think it was possible that Jesse's eyes were going to melt.

having to look at that many hours of Cal Newport talking about these topics. There's a lot of videos, Jesse, that you were sort of up to your neck in editing. So I think that's a hidden benefit. Yeah, it was good. It was good, though. Good videos. We're learning as we go along. Learning as we go.

Speaking of learning as we go, I figured, let's do a new segment, which I'm tentatively calling Cal reacts to the news. And the idea is simple. Let's just take a news article that I came across I thought was interesting and we will talk about it. So in today's Cal React to the News segment, I want to talk about a lot of articles talking about the same event, which is the New York Times,

and in particular, I believe it was their executive editor, Dean Beckway. I don't really know how to say his name. Sending out a series of memos to the New York Times report. saying essentially stop using Twitter so much. Let me quote from the article that I grabbed was from the Neiman Lab at Harvard. So the Neiman Lab at Harvard is like a journalism watchdog type organization. So that foundation writes good articles about stuff that's happening in media.

So in this article from Joshua Benton at the Neiman Lab at Harvard, he starts by saying, enough with all the tweeting already. That's how I'd summarize the New York Times new guidelines on how as journalists use Twitter this morning in a series of memos from executive editor Dean Bekwe. I'm for sure saying that wrong. And deputy managing editor Cleef Levy, the Times made it clear that it would like staffers to shoe away from the little bird, the little blue bird on their phones,

or at least not feed it as often. Okay. Now, if you go deeper into this article, And this is the best one of the various articles I read, this one from Neiman Lab was the best. If you go into this article, they pull out three different reasons given by the times for why they want their employees to use Twitter less or stop using it altogether. One is harassment. They think it makes it easier for the reporters to be subjected to online harassment. Twitter is conducive to that.

two is distraction. They do not write as well if they're spending all of their time on this heavily emotionally engaging and distracting medium. And three is influence on their reporting. There is an echo chamber effect. I think that exact terminology might have even been used. I guess Dean Beckwith called it echo chambers. He said we can become overly focused on how Twitter will react to our work to the detriment of our mission and independence. That was the third complaint.

If you're on Twitter all the time, it can really affect what you write about as a reporter in a way that's maybe not representative of what you should be writing about or how the whole nation as a whole feels about something. And so they said, you don't have to leave Twitter, but there had been a informal mandatory Twitter policy at the New York Times. It was heavily, heavily encouraged. And now they're saying that's no longer the case. And we're really good if you don't want to use it at all. So those are their three reasons. There's also a fourth reason they don't say. which I'll get to in a second, but is also another big reason why they're saying this.

They're just not admitting it. So we'll get to that in a second. But let's react briefly to those three reasons. And let me start by saying, and I am going to say this with all triumph, I told you so. So if you go back to my 2016 book, Deep Work, in that book, I talk specifically about the development that happened at the New York Times. This was right around 2014, 2015, I believe, when I was working on that book, where the New York Times got very serious about Twitter. This was an era where they initiated what they called the social media desk at the New York Times, and that desk began to heavily pressure their reporters to be on Twitter and to use Twitter.

And I reacted to that in deep work and said it is a bad idea for the New York Times to pressure their reporters to use Twitter. So I called this shot. I called it when they started doing this, that they were going to regret that move, that this was going to cause problems. Now, I have to lower my triumph because I would say the details of my critique were maybe less prescient than they could have been.

I was focused mainly on the distraction issue. I highlighted one of the reporters at the times who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting out of, I believe, the Paris Bureau. And I made this case that here's someone, who is doing fantastic work for the paper by cultivating long-term relationships with sources overseas,

by marinating herself into reality and nuances of this news environment and from there being able to produce these long, intricate, and incredibly revealing articles about what was happening in this part of the world. She won the paper of Pulitzer for it, and I argued,

who benefits if she has to instead be on Twitter? Because this is going to cause her to constantly be context-shifting, this is going to cause her to get involved in emotional entanglements and arguments and psychological torment online, it would objectively make her worse at doing this type of reporting. How is that possibly a good tradeoff for, what, more retweets online or slightly more attention from that small, very narrow crowd that is engaged in reporter interactions online, that they see the word New York Times more often. I was like, this does not make sense.

I think this is a bad idea. At that time, again, that was probably considered regressive. now what is this six years later, the New York Times is basically saying, no, you're right. That is a problem. No, I missed the other two things, but they're worth focusing on.

Their has been issue is a big one, but I'm going to generalize that. So let's generalize that beyond very specific and intense cases of, I'm really harassing you in a way that has legal ramifications and just talk about the psychological harm of Twitter interaction. These reporters are having their brains scrambled by having to be a part of these incredibly frustrating, highly partisan back and forth fights, completely interspersed with bots that are jumping in there and just trolling in the middle of the melee.

This makes you anxious and miserable and stressed. I recently talked to a New York Times reporter I know about this who absolutely validated that. It's a massive source of anxiety and stress. So even if you look beyond just this person is being harassed by a legitimate security threat style stalker, just normal Twitter behavior, especially in the sphere of news reporting, is psychologically incredibly damaging. That's a lot to have to expose someone to. It's hard to do your job or even live your life when you are being exposed to that type of back and forth.

The influence issue, that's another one that I didn't predict. when I wrote deep work because, again, the nature of social media was different in that era. I was writing that book largely in 2015. But I think that came to be a really big issue. And what brought that to my attention probably most prominently was when Barry Weiss resigned from the New York Times. I think this might have been in 2018 citing their perceived illiberalism. So for people who don't remember, Barry Weiss, I mean, I mean, she's like a slightly right of center reporter.

She was at the Wall Street Journal. After Trump won in 2016, the then editor of the op-ed page, the opinion editor for the New York Times said, we didn't, we missed this completely. Our newsroom had no idea this was even a possibility. We must be out of touch with like big swaths of the country. So we need to, we need to bring in more conservative voices. Now, they didn't go out and get fire breathing conservative voices. They brought on Brett Stevens. They brought on Barry Weiss.

These were people that were like barely kind of to the right of center. But whatever, they brought him in. And, you know, it took about two years before like Barry was gone, that the opinion editor was gone. They drove him out for publishing the Tom Cotton op-ed about using military force to help disperse protesters, which is a very bad thing to do, unless it's the Canadian trucker protesters. And it's a very good thing to do. The whole thing's very confusing. But anyways, Barry got pushed out.

And she said, in her, he said, and. her letter, she wrote a letter to the publisher of the New York Times. And one of the things she said was Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times, but it might as well be. It is the ultimate editor. So that was a really revealing moment. What she was trying to say is people are writing their articles with Twitter as their ultimate audience. What is going to be celebrated by my team on Twitter? What is not going to bring the approbation from my team on Twitter? What's going to best help me take my turn at the plate, taking a swing against the other teams on Twitter. So the very small number of people who actively use Twitter, which is very small,

there's something like 15 million active Twitter users in the U.S., and then a even smaller percentage of them that are actually using it a lot to do political dialogues. It's a very small non-representative group of people, but they're having this huge influence on what was being written. They were also, I mean, this is not an issue just with press. That very small group of very active people on Twitter also had a huge. influence on politics because a lot of politicians, their staffers are young, their staffers live, were living on Twitter. And so you were seeing a lot of political movements being influenced

by Twitter. I was just at a talk the other day by a philosopher who studies technology. And she was pointing out, and this is scary, the degree to which now you see people, you know, on the floor of Congress. And, you know, I think people can know what examples I'm talking about here, who are now just straight up performing for an incredibly small subset of their constituents that are active on Twitter. You know, they're just directly performing for that small Twitter. There's a photo going around during the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings purportedly of Ted Cruz checking his Twitter reactions on Twitter under the desk right after he was done

with his confirmation. So, like, Twitter is having this huge outsized influence, and it's so few people who are on it and it's so non-representative. And so the New York Times is realizing this. If we are writing to support our team, a very small team on Twitter, which is non-representative, even of the people who read the New York Times, that's a problem. The New York Times is not a, it should not, it should not, it should not be a system that's just trying to help people write good tweets or what have you. So these were all problems they pointed out, and they all seem like they were good problems. and they're all problems I would take seriously.

And I think it's very smart that if these three things are going on, that you start telling your reporter stop using Twitter. Okay. Or if you do use it, use it a lot less often. And I think it's a very important culture shift because it was until just a minute ago at the New York Times considered near mandatory to use those technologies. All right.

So I mentioned there was a fourth mystery reason unstated by the Times, but I think is looming over these decisions. and the other thing I think is going on here. This is the more cynical take is they are trying to get the balance of power away from the individual reporters and back towards the paper. So we can think of this as the Taylor Lawrence issue.

There's this big fight going on online right now between Taylor Lawrence and Maggie Haberman. So Taylor's a technology reporter who just moved to the post from the Times and Maggie Habermann's like a longstanding White House reporter for the New York Times. Times and they're having a fight about the role of things of like Twitter and the need for writers to have their own brands. But anyways, the TLDR version of this is Taylor, who is

younger, I think she's more like my age or younger, is from the school of thought of you as a writer have to have your own brand and you have your own audience that you have access to and you use social media platforms primarily to feed and connect with this audience. And your job at the New York Times, your job at the Washington Post is just like a platform that helps gives you credibility and makes it easier for you to build that audience. But what matters that you build your audience. And this is why, you know, this is what Barry Weiss did. So when she left the New York Times, she wasn't stressing about her bank account because she went and started her own media company built around a substack newsletter and a podcast that's bringing in millions.

She's doing very well with that, much better than she was doing at the New York Times. And so Taylor and Maggie were having this fight where Maggie's like, the reporting is what matters. Don't waste all this time trying to build online audiences and interacting with them and fighting online and being a part of the online cultural discussion write really good articles and Taylor's like that's naive this is the way you know things happen without taking a side in that fight I would assume the New York Times likes the Maggie perspective because it's much better for them if their reporters in other hands are putting the paper first and not their own individual personal brands because then they become too good for the paper. They're too big for the paper. They leave. They also get involved

in big, splashy fights. Taylor gets involved in a lot of these things, and it can be distracting and negative for the paper. They maybe like the model of just, look, Maggie Haberman knows Donald Trump and could get quotes from him off the record whenever she wanted, and therefore her TikTok reporting on, like, the Trump presidency was the best and, you know, help them win awards to their coverage. Like, they're like, let's just get really good reporters. So I think that's the other thing going on here is that in 2014, the Times like, Gilleson, on Twitter. It'll help get us readers. And by 2022, they're saying, wait a second, I think you're too big on Twitter. We should maybe come back. So that's the fourth mystery reason as

well. All right. So that's what's going on. That's my read of this case. There's obvious issues with Twitter for reporters. And there's just more sort of complicated cynical issue going on with reporters. I don't know. Again, in the end, I don't think my conclusion here is going to be surprising to our listeners, deep work is difficult. It rewards long, undistracted focus on things that are cognitively demanding that you can apply its skilled effort to. Writing at the highest level, writing at the level of the New York Times is cognitively demanding that requires deep work. And in most circumstances, it's probably going to be better for the paper and psychologically way more healthy and from a time management perspective, way more sustainable for reporters to be

freed from the burden of having to be in that bloody, messy, distracting, psychologically devastating arena that is Twitter. So regardless of which of those reasons you agree with or disagree with, I think most people will see there's enough good reasons there to justify this shift away from everyone associated with media in any sort of way, having to be so actively engaged on all of these platforms. So that's my take. And I'll just use that as an excuse. used to once again say, I told you so. All right. Well, Jesse, we got some good questions, but I think we should talk about a couple sponsors first.

I'll tell you the sponsor we should be thinking today is NyQuil, because that's where I am. Sudafed. I am hopped up on Sudafed right now. We'll see how that goes. Sudafed and Advil, I have aches, I have chills. I'm telling you, man, this is, and I think this is a literal fair comparison, the equivalent of Michael Jordan's flu game.

in, was it 96? Same thing. Same thing, right? Both in terms of the difficulty of what I'm doing and how bad I feel and how impressed the world will be by my performance here. You're going to come out and score 40? There's going to be a 30 for 30 about this podcast episode

we're recording right now. It's going to be called Minor podcaster, I think has a cold question mark. That's what they're going to call it. It will come right after the article when you got attacked by the zebra in Africa. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man, but sponsors.

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They'll get you healthier. My Body Tudor. T-U-T-O-R.com. We also want to talk about ExpressVPN. Now, you know that I am a believer in VPN. That stands for virtual private network with a VPN instead of directly connecting to the website or service you want to connect to, you instead connect first to a VPN server

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have no idea what you're talking about. Look, computer scientists like me, we use VPNs all the time. ExpressVPN is the one I use when I am in particular traveling or when I want to connect to places or I don't want them to know I'm connecting to them because it has the most server options, the most bandwidth. It's fast. It just works in the background.

You don't even know that it's on. You should be using a VPN too. And ExpressVPN is what I would recommend. So Blazing fast speeds, it'll work with all of your devices, phone, laptops, media counsel, smart TVs, and more. They now have servers in 94 different countries. So for example, if you don't live in the UK and you want to watch something on BBC, connect to a VPN server in the UK, and then go to BBC.

It thinks you're in the UK. You can see that free content. You can do that in a lot of different countries with a lot of different tools. So I recommend it. So be smart. Stop paying full price for streaming services and only get in fraction of their content. Stop letting your traffic be sniffed by anyone near by. Stop letting all these websites you're talking to, track every last thing about you.

and sell that to advertisers and use it to profile you. Instead, get a VPN like I use at ExpressVPN.com slash deep. Don't forget to use my link at ExpressVPN.com slash deep. If you do that slash deep, you will get a three extra months of ExpressVPN for free. All right. Sponsors. I heard Jesse that we have sold out every ad slot for 2022. So I think people are interested in the deep questions, deep questions audience.

So I guess thank you audience for being so sellable to. I don't know if that's a compliment or not. Whatever you are, you're very attractive to advertisers. So, you know, cheers. Keeps the podcast rolling. Keeps it rolling. Yeah. I mean, come on.

You're $500,000 a week. That paycheck. It's expensive. These type of digs that we record in, that doesn't come cheap. Coffee bill. The coffee bill, that alone is $50,000 a month. The dumb waiter for the drinks for happy hours. We don't have that yet, but that's coming.

I'll say I was looking at some of our YouTube videos recently. The HQ shows up, shows big on YouTube. I don't know if you notice this when you're editing them, but like when you watch it and you see this black curtain back there, to me it looks like I'm in like a really big. big like on a stage like we're in this like huge space with these curtains in the distance I don't think people realize that I could reach forward if I lean forward a little bit I could I could touch Jesse's face and this curtain seems like I don't know I'm giving away these secrets this curtain seems like it's you know 10 feet away in a giant giant platform but I'm touching it right now so it's funny we can see the bathroom while we're recording but you know what

I like the the suspension of disbelief that we are in like a math massive, massive studio. As we talked about, the table is really nice. It's a nice table. Yeah, it's small,

but it's nice. It doesn't show on camera, but there's like a really nice metal work, uh, legs. I don't know what you call it. But whatever.

All right. Well, I know people like to hear our thoughts on interior decorating, but suppose we should do a couple questions. Our first one comes from Andrew. Andrew asks, is the hive mind ever beneficial.

I am convinced by your core tenet that the hyperactive hive mind is almost always counterproductive to the ends it seeks to achieve. As a personal example, I used to work for a large consulting firm where incessant emails, teams messaging, and unproductive meetings were the norm. I now work for a 15-person startup with minimal communication and a lot of trust between team members. My ability to produce quality and develop my skills has grown significantly. However, as a thought experiment, I am curious.

whether you think that there are ever certain emergent outcomes of the hive mind spontaneity that ultimately creates better collective outcomes. Beehives, after all, are very impressive compared to individual bees. Well, first of all, Andrew, speaking of sponsors, whatever this company is you work for now, this 15-person startup, that should be a sponsor of the show because the way you describe that startup, I think you get a lot of really good applicants if you were to actually advertise. I love that. Minimal communication, lots of trust, your ability to produce work and develop skills has grown significantly. Everyone keep that in mind. There are companies, there are teams that do not just worship at the

altar of the hyperactive hive mind. They get things done. People are happier. They produce better work. The utopia I lay out in my book, A World Without Email, is possible. All right. So let's get to his question. Quick reminder, the hyperactive hive mind. This is a term from my book, A World Without Email, It is an idea. The notion is this is my name for the default collaboration and coordination strategy that most office work environments deploy. That's where you figure most things out with back and forth unscheduled ad hoc messaging, delivered via email, delivered via team, delivered via Slack.

I don't care about the medium. The defining attribute of the hyperactive hive mind is that it's just all unscheduled and on the fly. Hey, what about this? Did you get this? I don't know. Do you want to meet next week? When are you free? Hey, when should we, what should we tell this client when he comes?

Just messages back and forth. Asynchronous unscheduled back and forth. And the whole opening part of my book argues that for most places, that's a disaster. It's a disaster primarily because if unscheduled back and forth messaging is how you do most of your coordination, that workflow requires individuals to constantly monitor these channels of communication, not because they have bad habits, not because they've never heard about batching, but because it's required. You would slow everything down if you wait hours before you respond to everything, because you might have 10 different ongoing coordination decisions that need 15 messages each

to be decided. They all have to be decided by tomorrow. You can't wait four hours before you send the next one back. The hyperactive hive mind requires constant checking of channels. Constant checking puts you in a constant state of context shifting. Terrible, terrible set up to actually get cognitive work done at any sort of reasonable. level. Okay, but Andrew is saying, is there any instances in a work environment where the sort of like back and forth on the fly messaging might actually lead to a really smart outcome? And I would say, Andrew, the only instance I can think of is small groups. So if there's a small number of people, let's say three or less, working on whatever, getting a startup off the ground, and maybe they're

in the same office or you're spread over the country and you're on a Slack channel. That's actually a perfectly reasonable environment to say, let's just rock and roll. There's so much we have to figure out. We can't even list the stuff that needs to be done. We're just in crisis mode. Hey, what about this? Can you do this? Decision after decision, bouncing things back and forth. You're in a small group of people. It's not a bad way to coordinate. In fact, historically, and I'm talking pre-computer network technology, and the hyperactive hive mind is the workflow deployed by small groups of people. The example I give in my book is that if you have a collection of three Paleolithic mastodon hunters trying to position themselves to kill a mastodon, what's their collaboration strategy?

Hyperactive hypemine. Hey, what about there? Go over here. Do you hear this? Stop for a second. Okay, now I want you to move over there. On-demand ad hoc back and forth unscheduled. So hyperactive hive mind has a naturalistic foundation, very efficient, flexible way for small groups of people to coordinate.

once the groups get bigger, once they get beyond a small group of people, it doesn't scale. Then there's just too many conversations going on. Now you have to constantly be servicing it. The actual work these conversations are about now can't actually get done at any sort of reasonable level because you're constantly contact shifting. So once you get past a small group, no, Andrew, the hyperactive hive mind is almost never going to be what you need to do. So if you look at bees, for example, yes, the collective behavior. of bees is way more sophisticated than the behavior of individual bees. I'm more familiar with ant hives. The collective behavior of ants is way more sophisticated than what an individual

ant is actually encoded to do. I've actually done research on this. I've published some papers. They're probably pretty impenetrable, I would say, to the lay audience. I'm trying to think what the name of the last paper I wrote on this. I wrote a paper on this years ago. Now, this will put people to sleep. The basic idea was we were looking at a cooperative ant searching problem and we're proving mathematically the minimum bits of memory needed in an automaton representing an ant required for this collaborative search to be anywhere near optimal. And the hint is that it's something like the double log of the number of ants involved. You need something like the double log. So the logarithm of the logarithm, choose your base. I don't care. We're being

asymptotic, the logarithm of the logarithm of the number of ants. You need at least that much memory if you're going to have any hope of whatever your coordination algorithm is to fully take advantage of the collaborative search abilities. So maybe I should get a whiteboard and I'll go through some of the math. No, but anyway, the point is I know about this stuff. Those behaviors were evolved over millions of years because it's incredibly complicated to figure out the right individual behavior, the algorithm, so to speak, that these individual units run in an ant, hive or a beehive that's going to cause this really smart global behavior for the whole hive itself or the whole ant colony itself is really, really subtle and really, really difficult.

It took millions of years of evolution to figure out. That should be instructive when we're thinking about groups of people who are trying to work together in a business context. It is really hard to figure out what is the right stuff for each individual to do, the right behavior, the right rules by which you react a thing, the rules by which are mechanisms by which communication happens, whatever our digital equivalent is of the pheromone trails that ants evolved to use or the waggle dances that bees evolved to use. And if you don't know what a waggle dances, look it up. It's crazy. It's really interesting. That's really difficult to figure out.

So if you want to figure out the local behavior that's going to lead to an optimal emergent collective action, don't expect that to just be whatever you guys come up with, you know, in the three years after this new tool was introduced. Don't just expect it like, hey, guys, just rock and roll. Here's some email. Oh, here's teams. Enjoy. You're welcome.

That we're going to basically randomly stumble into what really would require an evolutionary sense, millions of years of evolution. And in a human sense where we could actually sit and plan, a lot of planning and experimentation. But we just assume productivity is personal. I'll give you objectives. Here's some tools to communicate. work it out. It's somehow that that's going to work. It's the equivalent of just putting a random algorithm into the brains of a bunch of ants. Let me tell you if someone who studied this,

what will happen if you put just an arbitrary algorithm into the brains of a bunch of ants? Those ants are going to disperse and be killed immediately. And yet when it comes to work, we just assume, ah, it should be fine. We'll let people figure out on their own, like, what's the right way to collaborate? We'll just email. It'll work out. And it doesn't. So anyways, this is my argument, Andrew, is that. the lesson from nature is that it's very difficult to build an effective distributed system, the individual algorithms, the rules, the tools by which you can build big systems that work well are not obvious, they're non-trivial, they require either a ton of evolution or a lot of

thinking and testing. So we should be way more serious about how we run our organizations. And to me, it's by far the most surprising thing about the state of business today is the lack of time we actually spend thinking about those things. There we go. Jesse, I'm sure you've read that paper of mine. Jesse brings it up all the time. There's a few simplifying assumptions in our constant state Markov model that he believes are elementary and maybe short-sighted. Am I quoting you correctly?

Pretty much, yeah, just as long as you get the whiteboard in here, we've got plenty of space for it. Yeah, we've got to get that whiteboard in here. Yeah. So now we have a triple threat podcast idea based on our previous discussions. Sports news on sports I know nothing about. Fantasy, like fandom news that just angers fans because we know nothing about the fandoms. And then we connect it with just a lot of mathematics. Triple threat.

We would just call it the worst podcast. This is truth in advertising. Oh, man. All right. Is that just one question? I'm sick. I got to pick up the pace. All right, we're going to pick up the pace here. Abyshech has the next question. Abyshek asks, how do I address a heavy workload? If I do not have much agency over the work assigned to me, I'm in logistics and has been a very busy period for the last few years.

Some days I find myself having a switch between three to five projects, a few of which have deliverables this week. I'm very good at scheduling my time, time block planning, multi-scale planning, etc. and my manager is a good manager, and they listen to me when I say have too much on my plate, but sometimes projects just keep coming back for additional rounds of bidding, and there are weeks when I have to work on three or four projects every day. What are some ways I can manage a busy week that requires frequent context shifting? All right, I'll be sure. There's a few things I want to say here.

I mean, the standard you have to maintain, of all the different types of advice I give, the standard that you want to maintain is I work on one thing at a time until a stopping point and I do not context shift during that work. No email, no slack. If I'm going to work on this, I'm going to work on this until a stopping point. I'm not saying if you have a 10-hour review, you're going to do 10 hours in a row without a stopping point, but you'll break that up. But when you're working on these chunk, you work on it without a context shift.

This means during busy weeks, there's not going to be a ton of time that you're actually able to, let's say, engage with the hyperactive hive mind back and forth, with the emails and the questions. And people might even in the moment get a little bit annoyed. Right now, for example, I'm just coming off this really hard period at Georgetown. It's hard because I was co-chairing a faculty recruiting committee and was sitting on another faculty recruiting committee. So we were just bringing out lots of candidates to interview. So it was hard in the sense that I just lost a lot of my time because meals, lunches, interviews, going to talks, etc. But I was committed when I work on one thing, work on one thing at a time.

When I was outside of all those commitments, I typically most of my time was being filled on the other stuff that has to be done, prepping for courses, research, et cetera, some writing. And so I didn't get to see my inbox a lot. And yeah, that would annoy people in the moment, but they get over it. I mean, I just saw an email in my inbox just before we went on the air. Like a few days ago, some writer friends of mine had sent out, someone like we should restart a writer's group, which were whatever. Like, it's good. And like, here's a doodle pull. Can people fill it out? I hadn't seen that because it's been three days since I've been able to look at that particular inbox. And I had a follow-up email that's like, you got to answer us because we want to move on. And, you know, so I'm annoying people. But, you know, sometimes that's just when you're in a busy week, you're going to annoy people. But you can give things full attention until you move on to next thing is going to make that much more tractable. It's going to reduce the amount of time that it requires. So I think that's important. Two, to the extent, possible. When a non-trivial bit of work falls on your plate, oh man, this project just came back for rebidding. Figure out before you get going the entire process for how you are going to execute

that, including how and when you're going to coordinate with other people involved. Reduce work in the processes. I'm going to work on this on this day. Wednesday afternoon, I'm having an open Zoom where I'm going to discuss three different projects that are going on now, so you have to come and talk to me then, and that's where we're going to do the revisions, and then I'm going to send it to you for feedback on Thursday morning. Spend that time up front. So you have clarity. Here is how we're going to execute going forward

and you're not wasting time thinking about what I should do next or having to do context switching and email to try to make progress on things. You want to as much as possible during busy periods, reduce your dependence on the hyperactive hive mind. The perfect state during a busy period would be one where you never have to look at an email inbox. It's all figured out how the work is going to happen and you're just executing. You're getting rid of that overhead. The final thing I want to say here, Abashch, is general.

You say your employers listen to you when you say you have too much on your plate already, but you are way miscalibrated. It is a very common issue. When you're trying to figure out what's a reasonable workload, when you say yes to things, you're looking at probably best case scenarios. You are calibrated and your load. A lot of people do this. They calibrate their load to the best possible case scenarios.

Well, you know, yeah, if I'm just working on one of these projects at a time, it shouldn't take too long, and there's like long delays before they come back and most won't come back. And so like this should be fine. Yes, I'll do this too. I'll do that too. You need to calibrate your workload instead to like expect a case or worst case scenarios. In a week where all of these things I say yes to have come back and I have to work out them all, given the other types of stuff I have to do for the company, will that be a sustainable week or crazy? And if it's crazy, then I have to say no. So a properly calibrated work. volume. That's my terminology for the total number of things on your plate that represent an obligation you have to satisfy. The proper calibration means there will be times where you feel underscheduled and then occasional times you feel like you really are using every minute of your day. And again, I think we calibrate too often for the best case or an average case. And so when we get those not-in-frequent harder cases, it becomes completely unsustainable. So if they'll listen to you, then tell them, I need to drop this load by another 50%.

The total number. And I would track large and medium projects on your plate. I would track it. And here's how many of these I should have. I'm at my quota. I can't take this on. If you're doing this sort of process-centric planning, put the work time for projects on your calendar so you can see real easily.

Like there's no time left for me to fit something else in. So I think you probably need to cut back more. on the work on your plate. All right. Picking up the pace, moving right along. We have Jeffrey. Let me just, just my papers here. All right, Jeffrey, what do you have for me? Jeffrey says, what do you do when your passion might start to become economically viable? Currently, I have an okay thing going as CFO for a small company, but for a long time I had a hobby writing fiction. I got some short stories published and professional publications. I even received a few prizes and caught the interest of an agent.

At this stage, I realized that the next step was to write a full novel, but this would take significant time. As a consequence, I'd perform some basic economic analysis to determine how best to spend my time. I'll spare you the details of all of Jeffrey's analysis, but basically he worked out that if he wrote one hour per day, it would take him three years to write the novel. And then he had a lot of issues about that. would he lose interest if he had to drag it out that long?

Though he has time to do that, would that be time he could have spent on other activities that would help him advance in his career as a CFO. So he was trying to figure this all out. All right. So, Jeffrey, my thoughts, A, it's clear from your tone that you're interested in novel writing and not super psyched about your job.

You say it's fine. I like my boss. It's manageable, but not super exciting. In your elaboration, you say that multiple times. That's interesting to me. So what you want to do, it sounds like, is seriously explore the possibility of making more of your income come from writing, spend more time writing. Now, I think we have to do a Derek Sivers thing here, right? We need to use money as a neutral indicator of value.

We can't just guess, especially when it comes to fiction writing. You can't just guess how much am I going to make as a writer and plan based off of that. You need to make money as a writer and say, here's how much I make as a writer. and then you can make really informed tactical decisions about what to do with your job. So how do you get to that information faster? Well, I'm going to say, first of all, you've got to write more than an hour a day. I think you should find out how to get the 20 hours a week. I think you can do that.

I think you need two-hour riding blocks, which means you probably have to start earlier in the morning and a large weekend block as well. I think do at least that. You can get to 20 hours a week. Now we're greatly accelerating the pace. And even if you're only doing 15 hours a week, you're greatly accelerating the pace. And then two,

take time off. Take two weeks off. Don't even have to be vacation. Look, you're going to assume that you're going to sell the novel and agent is interested. Roll the dice and take a two-week leave of absence. You can get easy 50 hours in two weeks.

So you can get like a big push to finalize and polish it. So that's what I'm saying, like 20 hours a week, 15, 20 hours a week. Four months from now, take a two-week leave of absence, knocked that thing out. So let's get the feedback soon. Get that novel out there, see if you sell it, how much money, what does my agents think, what is my editors think,

what are the reasonable case scenarios for my career here as a writer? Then you have the data to make the right decision. And the right decision maybe B's full-time writing. Maybe. I mean, if your spouse also works and you can live kind of cheap, that might work, maybe. And Jeffrey, I'm looking between the lines here, if Jeffrey is a pseudonym for Brandon Sanderson, I would say you probably are okay.

You're probably okay. You can probably quit your job. Or maybe what it is is you change your job. You know, you're a CFO of a small company. That means you could be a financial consultant for companies. We see this all the time, part-time CFOs that smaller firms and smaller nonprofits hire to spend 10 hours a week that keep their books and help them make decisions, but they can't afford a full executive.

Go to that work. and like, great, and I'll be able to do that 30 hours a week and I'm writing the rest. Then when my books get more successful, I can drop that the 10 hours a week. There's a lot that will be open to you, but you need the hard data and you have to publish the book or at least sell the book. Sell the book to get data to make that decision. And I'm just going to say, don't take three years. Work harder, take time off. Take some but manageable risk.

Risk not like quitting your job, but like leave of absences or putting aside all promotion activities for a few months. get the book done, see what happens. As Brandon Sanderson learned when he wrote name of the wind, sometimes he got to just write. All right, Jesse, it's not an episode if we don't annoy. Not only is that annoy fantasy fans, but annoys everyone who's not because they have no idea what the hell we're talking about.

So that's another double whammy. That's the type of stuff you're going to get with our triple threat show. Once things died down, he's probably going to be your first guest. Brandon? He'll be in here. He'll like Tacoma Coffee. Where's he based? He's like Utah or something.

I don't know. He's probably got enough money to fly here though. Yeah. He's got to fly out here. I do want to have, I mean, we do want to do guests. We're trying to think through like what the right format is. Do we want people who are living interesting lives, what famous people do it, whatever. We're trying to figure that out.

Selfishly, I want you to talk to a bunch of people. I want you to talk to Elon. I want you talk to Mark. Jesse has the most unreasonable plans for our guest. I think they all want to talk to you. Jesse has ridiculous. unreasonable plans for who's going to come in here. I can pick them up from the, you know,

the train in my truck. That'd be awesome. You picked up Elon in your truck, Zach Brick in your truck. You know how many publicists would get fired if those people came here and like they came with their publicist? They're like, oh my God, I'm terrible at my job.

No, I like your optimism. I like it. But anyways, we're going to have guests. And I for sure at the top of my list is I want to have novelists on. I think it would be cool to talk to. I'm going to talk to working, not literary novelist because that seems unapproachable and hard,

but genre. novelist and like tell me about your life yeah speaking of publicist real quick it's uh in some of those shows like the super pumped one and uh we crash one they have publicists in there and they get treated horribly the publicist oh this by those like really rich CEO dudes who are like a tenacious they just get and by the wives uh well hopefully lillian and margot you don't feel like I treat you that way. I try to be nice. We got a great team of publicist at Portfolio, who have been dragged around various cities with me going to various places and studios. And I always appreciate what they do. So Lillian and Margo, you have my appreciation. I will try not to be like the we work guy.

Speaking of work, just going to be another professional transition, speaking about work, I want to talk briefly about workable, the company you should be using to hire. Hiring is critical and it's never been harder. One stat that I just have off the top of my head, because I think about these things, is that there are 46% more jobs being posted in before the pandemic, and there are 44% fewer candidates applying to each one. So you need help hiring, use workable, to get that help.

When you sign up for workable, they will first help you cast the widest net possible by pushing your jobs to all the top job boards, more than 200 total. And they have tools to help you go through the process of hiring once you find candidates, video interview tools, e-signature tools. It'll even help you automate repetitive tasks like doing the scheduling itself, so you can focus on just talking to the candidate and hiring the right person. Whether you're hiring for your coffee shop or your engineering, team or if you need a new publicist for your publicity firm because your last one took your

client to Kelm Newport's Deep Work HQ and it was embarrassing. Workable is exactly what you need to hire the right people fast. So start hiring today with a risk-free 15-day trial. If you hire during the trial, a lot of people do, you won't cost you a thing. So just go to workable.com slash podcast and start hiring. Workable is hiring made easy. Just you know I'm sick and tired because they keep bumping into the microphone. This is real professional grade broadcasting. You don't see Joe Buck on the Super Bowl broadcast knocking into his microphone. So you know, you know, we're at our once in.

He just got a new contract, actually. Crazy contract. There's a lot of money in being good at talking about sports. By the way, it's really hard. I've learned it's really hard to talk clearly and confidently on the spot about anything difficult. And people are like, I know sports. Like, yeah, but you can't talk for two hours about here's what just happened in that play. And it's really difficult.

They never stumble. Yeah, and they have to know everybody's name and how to pronounce it. Yeah. Yeah, that's a hard. That's a hard job. Hard job. Another hard job is writing clearly. Look, here we are in 2022.

And you are out there trying to get things going again. Maybe you're trying to get a new job or grow your company. Nothing is going to be more important than being able to express yourself clear. and that requires good professional writing. This is why you need grammarly to help you produce that writing. Grammarly is more than a spelling and grammar checker. It's an all-in-one writing tool that allows you to clearly and effectively communicate your ideas. There's a free version and a premium version.

Both have features that can save time and give you the confidence of knowing your writing sounds professional. It works on all the devices you use. It works on all the apps that you write. You should use it. I have been messing around with Grammarly Premium. I am floored by the type of stuff these tools can do today. I remember when Grammar Checkers would tell you that you used a possessive form of there instead of the other form, and that was about it.

No longer. Today, it's like having a digital editor sitting there looking over your shoulder. Gramerly will actually adjust your clarity. It will tell you your tone. It will say, okay, we've studied what you're writing. This is the formality level. Maybe that's too formal. I was really impressed with what I see,

especially from the advanced features in Grammarly Premium. So it'll hope you be clear and assertive in your emails. It'll help you persuade your audience with a confident and polished tone. That's where the tone adjuster can work. Let's say you have a hard-to-read sentence. It's a full-sentence rewrite tool that you can get in Grammarly Premium. It will help you make that sentence much better. Let's say you're using too much jargon.

Its clarity suggestions will come in and say, just say it this way. This is much clearer. This type of stuff I get from my editors. You can get this now with the Gramerly Premium plugin. So get through those emails and your 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 a Gramerly Premium, you will get 25% or 20% off for being my listener. But you have to go to that Grammarly.com slash Deep.

when you originally sign up to get that 20% off. So that's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y. Dot com slash deep. All right. Jesse, we're going to do lightning round here. I have two questions. I'm out of time and energy, so let's do them fast. Question number one comes from Andrew.

Do you have suggestions for dealing with the trade-off between teaching and scholarship obligations. For me, as a professor at a liberal arts college, this balance is particularly hard because we're definitely expected to publish, but we teach a lot and we're expected to vote quite a bit of time outside the class to outside of class aspects of teaching as well. I've started to come to the conclusion that I might have to simply accept a lower standard of quality when it comes to teaching, doing what Oliver Berkman in his book 4,000 weeks, calls choosing what to fail at.

In other words, create assignments that I can grade more quickly. if they don't do the job quite like I'd like them to or assign fewer of them, stop filling with my lectures every single semester, etc. All right, well, Andrew, you're right, though I don't use, don't use Berkman's terminology here. Don't use Berkman's terminology here. You are right in the sense that you need to spend less time on your teaching prep, but you're not choosing to fail at your teaching prep. What I actually want to argue is that you can spend less time on your teaching without degrading the quality of your teaching,

if anything you might even increase the quality of your teaching. There's a sort of famous study that came out of Sunni, Stony Brook, and apologize I forgot the author's name, but he was studying professors in the classroom and actually found that a reduction in time spent in class prep could increase the positive evaluations of the course. So that's why I say you're right and you're wrong. You're wrong in saying that spending less time

means you're failing at teaching. I don't think that's the case. But you're right in the sense that you need to spend less time. come up with assignments that, yes, test the material well, but are also optimized so that they are not going to take up all of your time to grade. Once you've written a lecture really well, don't rewrite it from scratch every time you teach that course. Lean into the fact that you can reuse that effort. Do a 10% or 20% tweak rule. I do this a lot with problem sets.

Why am I going to rewrite a problem set from scratch every single time I teach a class? I've worked a long time on those problems. What I'm going to do is make it 10% better. So if I keep teaching this class over time, those problems says get much better and better, and the problem set I'm giving to my class five years from now is going to be much better than anything I could write from scratch. Like these type of things where you're trying to reduce time

do not mean you're giving up on the class itself. I've seen teachers completely drown at the college level in over-preparing for every lecture. Where often the lectures that come across well, as someone who knows your stuff well, they publish in the field, they're clear and they're confident, and they deliver the information. No clickers involved.

No complicated breakout groups needed. I know my stuff. I'm going to explain it clearly. I can make my expectations clear. Let's rock and roll. Actually, like a lot of students, like, great, I know what's going on here. I understand it.

I'm evaluated fairly. That's good. The other thing that kills professors from a time perspective in the classroom is this idea that if I'm not always accessible in every possible form, the students will be mad. A complete myth.

The students don't need you to be available all the time. They need extreme clarity about when you are available. If they have clarity about how I get in touch with Dr. Andrew and it's reasonable, they're fine. They just don't want to waste time worrying, like maybe I can't get in touch with them. Maybe I'm not going to get in touch with them. So Andrew, I think you can significantly reduce the amount of time your classes are taken in your schedule without reducing the quality, if anything, your students might like it better. All right. Final question, moving fast.

It comes from Patrick. How do you approach complexity? I always wonder how effective thinkers approach complexity. Of course, it all starts with getting a cursory overview and then circling in on certain points, weighing options, etc. But how do you approach all of this when already the first step requires you to make decisions? That's when I start to lose my mental framework and get lost in different scenarios. Inless research and tend to get overwhelmed by dependencies between different factors. And I'm not talking about doing fancy research project.

For me, this is trying to buy a vacuum cleaner. Patrick, you exhaust me just hearing you talk about this. It sounds like you're someone who spends probably too much time on those rationalist bulletin boards where everyone's trying so hard, like, if I can just figure out how to be super, super rational about everything, I'll optimize everything I do. And no one can be, no one will ever be able to like say something mean to me because I'll always know the right thing and always act in the right way. You got to loosen up, Patrick. You got to loosen up. When it comes to personal life decisions, just make a reasonable choice. Choose a couple things you

like about it. Be happy about it. Move on. You have a fine vacuum cleaner. I like that the cord is long. Great. Move on with life. Don't obsess about it being the right vacuum cleaner or that you're the best vacuum cleaner guy or you know more about vacuum cleaner than anyone else because that's going to exhaust you and also it makes people think you're annoying. Now when it comes to mastering complex ideas and research and work and writing, that's a whole other different topic. But even over there, and I'll just tell you this very briefly, Patrick, there's a lot more intuition involved in that than you might expect. Like, If I'm working on a complex topic, like I'm around like a really long article or a book chapter or something, I'll marinate in it.

I'll read. I'll talk to people. And then when it comes time to write about it, I try to apply a simplifying framework to it. And I just listen to my gut. And if it doesn't feel right, there's like a nagging little friction, a little bit of grit in the gears, I'm like, I got to change something here. Either got to simplify it or change the framework. And when it feels right, I'm like, this is good. Not that I'm getting things exactly right.

Not that this is like every detail that matters, but this is a deeper, almost mythological truth about this situation. It's getting to the core of it because it feels right. It doesn't feel like there's grit in the gears. It doesn't feel like this doesn't quite fit with that. There's a lot of gut to it. And you practice by reading lots of arguments at similar levels of complexity in books, listening to a podcast of smart people. So you train your taste. I understand when complex ideas are presented well, but honestly there's a lot of gut involved in it.

So Patrick, chill out a little bit. Your vacuum cleaner is fine. You're not going to optimize everything. Do the best you can. Focus on what's interesting. Trust your gut. All right, Jesse, well, that's all I have before I collapse here. So thank you, everyone who sent in your questions.

If you like what you heard, you'll like what you see. The full episode will be available at YouTube.com slash Kalimport Media. You also like what you read on my newsletter, my email newsletter, sign up at caldunupupup.com. If I survive, we'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.