Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 19: Calendar Shaming, Digital Detox Struggles, and the Unexpected Challenges of Autonomy | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on calendar shaming, digital detox struggles, and the unexpected challenges of gaining more professional autonomy, among many other topics.I will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* Modernizing GTD [2:18]* Calendar Shaming [7:59]* How I keep track of projects [14:15]* Staying relevant when less connected [16:29]* The inherent unpredictability of kids and facing the productivity dragon [19:21]* Quantifying career capital [25:09]AUDIO QUESTION OF THE DAY [28:17]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* Dealing with screen time overload [31:36]* Is a Kindle a screen? [36:32]* The relative depth of books versus podcasts [36.48]* Digital detox struggles [39:26]* Instagram struggles (hint: my suggestion starts with a ‘Q’ and rhymes with ‘bit’) [44:02]QUESTION ROULLETE [45:49]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Interviewing people you want to emulate [49:04]* Dealing with psychological hurdles such as negative self-talk and impostor syndrome  [54:30]* Learning hard things fast [1:03:53]* Vitamin solitude [1:05:24]* The challenges of autonomy [1:07:54]*  Understanding those upset by depth [1:11:05]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. I find myself on this rainy Sunday morning, the Deep Work World headquarters, excited about the batch of questions that I have ahead of me here. I'm hoping we can get through most of them. I think we have some really interesting topics to tackle. I mean, I keep saying every week, look out soon for, for you. a new survey being sent to my mailing list at calnewport.com to solicit more questions. But the problem is, is the last survey I sent in July, it has so many good questions that I don't get very far before I filled up my whole show. So like what I do is I'll go through and say, okay, here's how far I've gotten. I've looked at all the questions up to, let's say,

question 300 that's been submitted. So now I'm going to start looking at questions for this week, starting at question 300. And the good ones I'll pull out for potential use. in the show. And the problem is, is your guys' questions are so good. It's like every question I see becomes when I pull out for the show and I only get through about 100 questions before I've filled up my whole show. So it's taking me longer than I thought to actually get through the questions you've already submitted. But I think that's a good sign. I think it's a sign that you guys all ask very good questions. But I will be sending out a new survey soon because I want the questions to be topical. Obviously late August looks different than early July when I sent

out that last survey. So keep an eye out for it. on my mailing list at Caldnewport.com, but in the meantime, just my thanks for submitting really good, really sharp questions. So we have a lot to get to. Let's do it briefly. Of course, subscribe, ratings, reviews. I know podcasters say that a lot,

and it just falls into the background noise, but it is actually one of the number one ways that new people find to show. So if you like the podcast, I do appreciate that. I read all the reviews on Apple, and I've really appreciated those of you who have submitted them. All right, enough admin. Let's get rolling. and get started with, as always, some work questions.

Jordan asks, what changes would you make to the getting things done methodology to modernize it? Well, Jordan, I think one of the big ideas of GTD that remains incredibly valuable is the notion of capture. That everything that you need to do, every obligation on your professional plate is written down somewhere in what David Allen calls a trusted system. The trusted is the key part.

That means your brain believes that you will, in fact, go back and look at that system. It will not be forgotten. If it trusts that, it can let it go. It can close what Alan calls the open loops in your head. And that reduces a lot of stress. And this is what was, I think, really innovative about Allen's approach, is that it's psychological. It's really one of the first examples of psychologically aware productivity theory.

Alan has a background in Zen Buddhism. He cared a lot about stress and brain states, and invented a system in part to help your brain state be more positive. So that's what I think is really good about GTD. That lesson remains critical today, just as it did back in the early 2000s, when Alan first published that book. So what needs to be modernized? Well, there's two things I often talk about

when I push back against classic GTD. The first is the idea that not all efforts can be reduced to widgets. So in the original, let's call it canonical versions of GTD, I believe Alan was very clear that all work efforts can be reduced to what he calls next actions, actions that take a few minutes to do,

and he would use the phrase cranking widgets to talk about what it's like to actually just go from one next action to the next. Now, as you know, fans of me and my writing is that I think there's a lot of professional efforts that are more complicated than just simple actions you can do. And in particular, a lot of efforts that require deep work aren't discreet and they aren't short. It's like I need to struggle for a couple hours with a really, cognitively demanding and thorny problem. You need to try to figure out a new creative strategy for this product. I need to try to find a foothold to get this proof solved. It's not next actions.

It's large periods of time dedicated to a particular type of pursuit or thinking. That's not well suited for canonical GTD. Now, later Allen, sort of non-canonical later Alan shifted the way he talked about getting things done in those type of activities I think GTT fans today will tend to say no no

the whole point is you want to get stuff out of your head to clear time so that you can do that type of work which I think is a very good way of thinking about it I know Alan will talk about it that way more recently but you know I have gone back and I've studied the Bible the original edition of GTT I have it

and I've read the initial interviews. Part of this is for a long-form article. I've been working on for a while now, where I went deep on GTT. So look out for that. I'll have more news on that if we ever get that towards publication. But I'm convinced that, no, no, this was the original GTT methodology, was everything is next actions.

It's all cranking widgets. And again, I think that doesn't capture, especially in competitive, demanding modern knowledge work, not everything is widgets. The other brief thing I'll note is that I think, GTT needs to be augmented with a lot more sophisticated thought about how you approach and plan your day. Again, in canonical GTT, the idea is you have these lists of very clear, discreet next actions. You arrange them into context, at the phone, at the store, an email, or whatever.

And then as you move through your day from one context to a next, you just look at the list for that context and just start cranking. this item, this item, until you move to a new context. It's supposed to be stress free. You don't even think about it. There's no stress. You just crank widgets, change context, crank widgets, change context, crank widgets.

And when your day is over, you've gotten good stuff done. Now, obviously, again, readers of mine know that I feel that the allocation of cognitive resources within a work day is a much more complicated and fraught activity. It's why I really put,

something like time block planning where you really think hard about here are the minutes I have available today. What do I want to do with them? And I believe, and I've said this a lot, I believe you get a lot more return on your effort than if you instead use what I call the list-based reactive approach, where you run your day off of reacting to emails and then occasionally check in a list to say, what else I want to do. I think there's a subtlety to how you actually plan your day that makes a big difference. It's not a big point of focus in GTD.

So Jordan, that's a long answer to a short question. The reason I have such a long answer, I think should be at least an indication of the respect I have for Allen and GTD. There's some fundamental ideas in there. But recognizing that there's activities beyond widgets and recognizing that controlling your time in a day is more complicated than just cranking through list,

adding those two things on top of Allen's very solid foundation, that'll really put you in a good place. Kyle asks, how do I get into the flow of deep work when I'm invited to meetings all the time? Now, he elaborates, ideally I would like to get my deep work done in the mornings, but there always seems to be a recurring meeting invite conflicting with those times. Then there are the ad hoc invites when something becomes urgent, and he says, note, this is especially true of leadership, and I feel like I can't decline invites from people in those positions.

If I try and time block my calendar, there are times when I can get calendar shamed. And people say things like, I tried to set up a meeting, but your calendar looked full. Are those appointments real? Well, Kyle, there's three things I want to say. Number one, your question is illustrating a real problem with modern knowledge work. We are not good at organizing groups of human brains. to produce valuable information, right? That's the goal of knowledge work.

We're not good at it. We're much better at industrial work. We say, okay, here's our plan. We have a bunch of raw materials, and we need to organize a lot of machinery to produce cars at the other end. Well, we're really good at that. And we can do that today 100x more effectively

than we could when we first started trying to turn metal into cars. We're really good at that. But in knowledge work, we're not. We are not good at organizing brains to produce value. And this is a great illustration of that reality. People are bad at productivity. People are bad at organizing their time. People are bad at organizing teams.

And so they throw meetings at it. And then you feel busy. And then you feel productive. Doing something like capture, configure control is a pain. It's much easier to say, man, I'm stressed because I'm now committed to run this meeting for this team. And if I put a recurring calendar invite for, or a meeting on my calendar. I'm like, okay, problem solved.

At least I know we'll talk about this each week. At least I'm taking some action. You scale that up over all the different efforts going on within a company. And we get Kyle. His entire day fractured. Most of his time spent talking about work and not doing work. It really doesn't make sense. So first of all, Kyle, I'm just vinting.

I think what you're saying, I feel your pain and what you're saying underscores that agree to which in a lot of knowledge where context, this notion of just let's just rock and roll. Let's just give each other IT. is that we have IT tools. We have email, we have Slack, our shared work productivity suites. And I put that term in giant ironic quotation marks, as I say it. Make it real quick to set up meetings and make them regular and get invites out

and gather the times when people can meet. But we don't think about, well, what's the actual best way to take these brains to produce value? All right. Two things about what you can potentially do here. One, this might be a good case study for my deep to shallow work ratio method. I talk about this in the book Deep Work. I've gotten a lot of feedback since that book came out saying that this technique has been successful. The basic idea is you work with whoever is above you, whoever supervises or manages you.

And you say, this is what deep work is, this is what shallow work is, both are useful, What is the ideal ratio for my position? Like what is the ideal ratio of deep to shallow work in a given work week that's going to optimize the value I produce? Because if I do zero deep work, well, that can't be good because that's the primary activity in which I can produce high quality value added information. But if I do zero shallow work, then there'll be no meetings, there'll be no coordination. and we'll have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing, so that'd be no good. So what's the optimum? You agree on a number.

And then you measure and come back and say, hey, we agreed on this, whatever it is, 50-50. But I'm looking at my time block here, averaging five meetings a day, averaging 45 minutes max of free time between meetings, which is not nearly enough to get any real actual concentration in. We're not hitting this number that we agreed on would maximize the value I produce for you.

Maximize the value. I produce my organization. So what can we do about it? And as I've heard reported time and again, people who would have sworn that the cultures of constant connectivity in their organizations are entrenched and will never change.

And that they ascribe this to bad characteristics of their bosses who love that control and would never give an inch when they go through this exercise. They're surprised by how quickly major cultural changes happen. just having a data point and coming at the issue from a positive angle, how can I be more valuable as opposed to saying, what can we do to get you to stop bothering me so much?

Coming at it from that positive angle, it works really well. So, Kyle, you might want to try that. Some of the solutions that come out of this is it's pretty common for offices to basically do things like, okay, for you, you don't do meetings before 11 or whatever. There's some pretty simple fixes, but to get to those fixes to get buy-in, coming at it with this quantitative positive approach of the deep to shallow work ratio, that seems to work pretty well. The third point I want to say is you might just have to be calendar shamed.

But people respect meetings and appointments. They understand this. You have a meeting, you have an appointment. You're not available in that time. So people come back like, well, you sure have a lot of appointments. Are those real appointments? You say, yeah, I'm busy. Busy time.

through a lot of stuff, getting a lot done, full calendar, move on. Probably just get left there. And this would allow you to continue blocking off deep work times on your calendar and getting the most out of those times. So that's the third thing I would say is maybe actually just take a little calendar shaming. It probably won't go farther. All right, good question.

Kyle, got me worked up about how bad we are about working. But I think it's healthy for me to get mad about knowledge, work, unproductivity, at least once per week. So you've helped me hit my quota. asks, how do you track what you are working on within a project? Well, Casey, it depends on the type of project. So if it's a writing project, a book or an article I'm doing for a magazine, for example, I tend to use Evernote.

I'll just collect ideas, outlines, articles, interviews, whatever. I throw it all into Evernote. That becomes my sort of masterplace for whole. for a computer science article, so an academic article, I use a tool called Overleaf. It's a slight background. If you do mathematical papers or any type of scientific paper that has a lot of mathematical notation, you tend to use what are known as markup tools. We use one in our field called latex, L-A-T-E-X, and it allows you to actually typeset, you know, complicated mathematical symbols. Well, Overleaf is just a web-based tool that allows multiple people from different places in the world to collaborate together online on the same markup late tech document.

So it's just like Google Docs, except for this tool that allows you to do fancy mathematical symbols. So for academic papers, I've learned through trial and error just to go straight to the formal marked-up academic paper tool and just start dropping ideas in there when you have a conversation with someone about a proof. put the notes right into that document. And so we basically just grow out a paper. And all of our thoughts just get stored in that one document. And that tends to work better than trying to have notes and other types of systems. The one exception is I do have paper notebooks, grid notebooks I use when I'm working on a particular piece of a proof away from a computer. Like maybe I'm hiking or on a walk.

But I transfer any good ideas out of that notebook. I transfer them into the master document to access using Overleaf, and when I want to tell my collaborators about recent progress, that's where I point them towards. All right, thanks, Casey. Good question. Conrad asks,

how do you deal with coworkers who lose connection with you when you shift from being a source of instant help via chat and email? For background, I had built a reputation for being helpful, and that has helped me get my name known more widely in my department. If I start cutting shallow work and taking longer to reply,

I feel like people will be less inclined to seek my advice. So Conrad, one thing you might try is office hours. You know, you have set times publicly advertised where you are just straight up available for questions. And if this is a remote work setup, it can be a Zoom meeting room. It's a persistent link where it's just always open during these times. And if you're in a physical working scenario, it's just your door is open, your phone is on. I mean, you can even just say, look, I'm going to definitely be on Slack during those times too, however you want to do it. But just people know.

Maybe it's twice a week and maybe it's for an hour each time. And then you can just let people know, like, hey, look, if you ever have any questions about anything, here's my office hours, always stop by, I'll always be there. I love to talk about it. This is becoming a little bit more popular. in the corporate world, Jason Freed's company, Basecamp, they do this,

especially with their experts, so people who have a domain of expertise within their company that get asked a lot of questions, they use office hours. It's been popular for a long time in the venture capital community. I have a whole section about this

in my new book coming out in March. I really get into the rise of office hours in these non-economic environments. But here's the thing you need to know about a con rep. It might feel like on paper. Wait, if I go to office hours, I am actually restricting my availability. Whereas before anyone could chat me or email me at any time,

now I'm saying it's an hour here, an hour there, an hour over there. And it seems like much less time, but it will not feel that way to the people in your organization. You will actually seem more accessible because there's clarity and there's no friction. If I just know, like, hey, Conrad is always available Tuesday at 12

and Wednesday at 2 and Friday at 10 and it's just part of my routine and that there's no social capital involved there's no friction, there's no like will he get back to me am I bothering him I'm just in the habit of jumping in those office hours and asking you questions

I'm going to feel like you are more available and easier to get in touch with the bar is lower for talking to you I'm less self-conscious about it so it can seem paradoxical but I've seen this effect play out Conrad restricting your availability but adding much more clarity about that availability

can actually make you seem more available and more helpful than doing it in a more ad hoc fashion. Jonathan asks, how do you schedule around the inherent unpredictability of kids? You've talked about the importance of drawing a line in the sand between I'm providing child care and I'm not providing child care, therefore can work deeply, and I dig it, but kids like to confound schedules,

needing both parents when one is supposed to be off child care duty or melting down unpredictably, etc. Well, Jonathan, let's all first admit that although in many factors of life, kids are the best, when it comes to work, when it comes to productivity and work, kids really are the worst. They really are productivity devastators. And has there ever been a time when this was more true? than when we have a non-trivial fraction of the U.S. workforce that now has to do this work at home with, wait for it, the kids at home instead of in school.

So, yeah, I think this fall is going to literally be the worst for a lot of us from a productivity perspective. So let's all just acknowledge that. Everyone has this issue. You know, there's a lot of things you get from kids, a boost to your productivity really is not one of them. Okay, so what do we do about it? Well, I want to go back to this idea from a recent podcast episode,

which I called Facing the Productivity Dragon. Once we stipulate that kids are going to screw with your best attempts to have a schedule, they're going to screw with your best attempts to have shifts. Right now, this is your shift with the kids and I'm working, that my shift is later. As you say, they'll screw with that because this kid is going to be sick while this kid is having a meltdown. They are going to blow out any plan you have consistently. Maybe they're going to stay up all night and now you're trying to do deep work because you're tired or there's going to be a snow day when you had a big meeting. I mean, we all know this drill.

And so I come back to this idea of when this happens, you cannot run from it. I think there's a temptation to say, this is impossible. I cannot be productive with these helions around. So let me just fall back into list reactive mode.

A productivity fetal position, we're like, let me just rock and roll on emails and maybe try to get some things off a list and just feel busy and harried. And that'll just be that. I say no, face their productivity. Dragon. Okay, you got knocked off your schedule. Next time you have a moment, you have to say, what's the best I can do with the time that remains? Now that I've got the melted down kid

out of my office and I'm back to my work shift, I'm building a new time block schedule for the time that remains. How do I salvage what's left? How do I get the most out of what's left? How do I make sure that I've lost nothing from my capture system? We got interrupted by, you know, the kid had to go to the emergency room or whatever, but I want to come back and go through the discipline of capture. You know, everything that was going on, I have it written down, it's in my system, there's nothing in my head. Maybe I need to tweak my weekly plan, because we lost an entire day, because, you know,

a snow day kept the school closed or something like that. I have to change my whole weekly plan, but I'm going to change the weekly plan. What's the best possible weekly plan I could do going forward, given this reality happened? I'm still going to shut down. I'm still going to wake up each day and build the best plan with what I have. You know, the underlying idea here is that you don't get a gold star. for following a plan without deviation.

If we got gold stars for that, young people with no kids would be covered in gold stars and the rest of us would have none. Doesn't mean much. What you're trying to do here instead is deploy intentionality with your time and energy.

Essentially, from a physics perspective, your body is generating a certain amount of energy every day. A lot of that's going to go to your brain, your brain thinking about lots of things. And the only question is, to what degree are you able to focus that energy? It's all going to happen. You're going to disperse whatever it is, this many calories of energy every day. So the question is, what degree of that can focus it on things that produce professional value? And the whole game is just trying to maximize that each day, try to focus what is available as much as possible on professional demands and being

intentional. Let me fix my plan. Let me do full capture. Come back to the time block. Come back to the weekly. Do the shutdowns. It's just going to take whatever energy you had available and get the best out of it that is possible for you that week. Now, some weeks, that's going to be a lot less than others. And this fall, I think for people with kids, it's going to be a lot less than the people without kids. But just relative to yourself, there's a compounding return here. If you keep coming back to try to get the most you can of the energy you have, you keep facing the productivity dragon. even though it's mean, and even though it is not fair, and even though it wears you down, you face the dragon again and again, it compounds.

And the amount of productive work you end up producing by the end of the fall is going to be 5x more than if you instead ran from the productivity dragon and hid in the proverbial inbox and just stayed busy and harried and upset and reactive. All right, so that's my advice, Jonathan. I think we all agree. Kids are terrible for productivity, but you have to keep fighting the battle. Those extra little edges do add up in the long term. All right, let's do one more work question. David asks, are there data-driven ways to appraise your career capital?

David, yes, they are. It's called money. Now, I know that sounds a little bit glib, so let me fill in the details. This actually comes from my 2012 books so good they can't ignore you. And I get this concept actually from the entrepreneur and writer Derek Sivers. And Derek had this really cool concept, which he called money as a neutral indicator of value. Now, basically, his point is for someone to give you verbal praise. Say, that's really great.

I love that idea. You're really great. You're really good at this. It costs them nothing. And it makes you happy. so people are going to bias towards saying nice things to you. But when it comes to getting people to give you money, no matter how much they like you,

no matter how much they don't want to hurt your feelings, no matter how much they want to be socially positive, people don't like to give away money. And so Siver says that's probably your best way to evaluate in this field, how valuable am I? You ask how much money are people willing to pay for my services. If you're freelancing or selling something, are people buying it,

Are people willing to pay me hourly? How high are they willing to pay me? And if it is within a more traditional corporate structure, am I getting jobs? Am I getting raises? Are people trying to hire me away? Now, the important thing about this concept of money as a neutral indicator of value is that it doesn't say that money is the most important thing.

It doesn't say that your goal should be to pursue as much money as possible. It's just Derek Siver saying, and I think rightly, use people's willingness to give you money as the most objective and neutral gauge you have of how valuable is this thing I'm doing. Sivers famously employed this technique to decide when to leave his job in the music industry. I think he was working at Warner Brothers to pursue his work as musician full time. And basically he said, well, when I'm making comparable money on the side from my music, that will be my indicator that the world values my music capability.

about as much as they valued my skills as a music executive, and then he made the switch. So I think it's a good idea. So David, let money be the very best appraisal you have. So in whatever field it is that you're trying to build up a skill, look at the relative scale there. You know, what would be a pretty good amount of money to get paid for this? And then see if people will pay it. And that's how you'll know is my capital. What is my capital worth? Do I have enough capital to make a move like Sivers did when he left his job, or do I still have some work to do building up skills? All right, thanks for that question, David. Why don't we do now an audio question of the day? Hi, Cal. Thanks for the great work you do. My name's David. I work as an actual

consultant in Arizona. I've identified innovation as valuable career capital, but I don't want to spam my colleagues with underdeveloped ideas. You've talked about how you test new ideas on your blog and you've encouraged the use of the Socratic method while learning. Are the other processes or habits you use to evaluate of a new idea as merit is defensible and ready to be subject to criticism? Thank you. Well, certainly with experience, you get better at figuring out which ideas have promised. So actually by just trying ideas and seeing what works and what does and what's actually involved, just let's get better at it. You're developing what, you know, sometimes is called taste in your field. I'm taking that term actually from an interview with Ira Glass that I talked

about and so good they can't ignore you. We talked about the first key step to producing innovative work. and he was, of course, talking about in radio. You know, he's the creator and host of This American Life on NPR. But he talked about the first important step was developing taste, getting good at figuring out like what's good and what's bad. And once you know what's good and what's bad, at least now you have the right metric to keep trying harder to find the good things. And until you have taste, you're just kind of throwing things up at the wall.

I think this holds for a lot of different ideas. So just with practice and experience, you'll get better at figuring out, hey, I think this idea really has merit. It doesn't make it easier to find those good ideas. Just like developing taste in radio is much easier than actually putting together an innovative show that can satisfy that taste. But it's a key first step. So that's one thing I would say is that you will get better at doing your own self-filtering of ideas. The second suggestion, this is something I've seen, is put together a working group.

you plus two or three other people, meet every other week, you know, call it the Friday morning club. Maybe you get together for coffee before you go into the building or something like this, right? So there's a little bit of ritual around it. And the whole point of the club

is to bounce new ideas off each other. I think these are really effective. I mean, everyone brings to the table. Hey, I've been thinking about ideas for the business, ideas of where we could expand. Some of them are going to be a little bit off the wall. But let's just, just, you know, no judgment, let's bounce.

Bam, bam, bam, bam. Getting an idea in front of another person, as you've probably learned, is a great source of objective feedback. And this is a way to do that at a really high rate without feeling like you're spamming your whole organization or getting the reputation as the guy who always has some new big idea that he's emailing that people are rolling their eyes about. So give that a try.

You know, have the Friday morning club, make it a place for doing exactly this type of brainstorming, and you'll get a lot of that feedback. and then again, these two things work together. You do the Friday morning club enough, then your own personal taste is going to sharpen to the point where you get better and better at figuring out, okay, these are the ideas that really work.

And that's where you're going to really see your trajectory probably take off in your career. All right, let's move on now with some technology questions. Tired Eyes asks, what is your advice on facing too much screen time? I can't seem to isolate myself from the computer day and night during this lockdown. I have a job from 9 to 6 p.m.

I'm assuming that means 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. And then online classes via Zoom from 7 to 10 p.m. Sleep, repeat. We'll have a couple of things to suggest here, tired eyes. First of all, let's just accept you're in an unusually hard schedule because you are taking online classes at the same time that you're working. And everything is online these days. So that might have felt differently in times past

if you were at an office building to L5, and then let's say you drove across town to a college campus where you went to some night classes, it would feel really different because you're in locations, you're changing locations,

you're around other people. It would be hard, but there's a vitality to it. So I think it's a really good point you make here, which is there is a hidden cost to moving everything on the screens. And this homogeneous nature of the experience, can be fatiguing and draining, and not just to your eyes, but just to your life force in general. So it is an unusual circumstance we're in.

I point that out only to say this is not a permanent circumstance. So part of your response here can be, all right, guys, we're going through a hard period where everything is on the screen, but it's not going to all stay on the screen. So there's a little bit of a hunker down mentality coupled with hope. We know this will get better. Now, I'm just guessing that you could use this injection of optimism because of your question wording, where you described yourself as being in a lockdown. Now, I don't know where you are actually writing from, but there's actually very few places in the world right now that are under a lockdown,

in the sense that there's a shelter-in-place order or most non-essential businesses are closed. you know, in April and May, a lot of the world was. In July and August, very little of the world actually is. So there might be a mentality you have of, like until things are all the way back to normal, it's just easier for me to think about it as being all the way bad, but we're actually somewhere in between. And if you take a break from online news and social media for three or four days,

I'm telling you you'll feel a lot better, at least temporarily, about the state of the world. So I just want to give you that injection of hope that you can think about this is a temporary hard time, and that might help. But what can you do during this temporary hard time? You need to get outside. You need to move. And you need to do this a lot because you're otherwise in an incredibly artificial situation. 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on a.m. on a. is really artificial and really unhealthy if it's not broken up. And so I would suggest you start in the morning. You should have a pretty intense routine in the morning where you're up, you're moving your body.

I want you to do about 5,000 steps outside in the morning at least. That's a serious walk outside, getting some sun, getting some vitamin D. I want you to hydrate. I want you to do no more than five minutes of exercise, but five minutes that is going to wake up every muscle in your body. Like jump on a pull-up bar, do some push-ups, full body weight, you know, hold something heavy and squat. Like big muscle groups actually having to work.

Do 15 burpees. We're not trying to body build. we're not trying to do a 30-minute routine. We just want you to be outside, sunlight, moving, hydrating, all of your major muscle groups waking up and doing something. Then throughout your day, I want you to schedule three or four, one to two thousand step breaks. You can fit these into the 10 minutes.

And, you know, you might have to be surreptitious about some of these, where you kind of just step away and hope no one needs you in that moment. But you can find three or four breaks between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m. You go outside. It's 10 to 15 minutes, brisk walking, 2,000 steps, sunlight, fresh air, hydrate the hell out of yourself during those periods. This is a minor thing.

But if you're getting this like 10 to 15,000 total steps outside, muscle movement, good hydration, never more than a couple hours in a row without being outside and moving briskly, I'm telling you it's going to be night and day. Still not optimal, but way better than being locked in your chair. staring at this screen for 13 hours.

Right? So that's what I'm going to tell you, hey, you're not in lockdown, and it's only going to get better. It's a hard year. Better years are coming. So we're in survival mode. And the right way to survive your current situation

is movement, movement, movement, to a degree that it's almost like an obsession, but it is going to make you feel much better. Shawshank asks, do you think a Kindle should be considered screen time? No, I don't. I think you should think about your Kindle time the same way you would think about physical book reading time. All right. Keeping with this book theme, PC asks, is reading a book deeper work than listening to a podcast?

If so, how? I think typically, yes, book reading is deeper work than listening to a podcast. And to be more precise, I mean more cognitively demanding and, produces more cognitive strengthening benefits. The difference, however, is not major, and I think they are both good, and I think both activities should be highlighted and can both be part of a deep life for sure. So why is reading a book going to be slightly deeper? Well, for one thing, it is a more intense cognitive exercise.

Book reading, literacy in general, is not a natural human behavior. I've talked about this before on the podcast, but basically humans have had to rewire parts of our brain to be able to read. We've taken parts of our brain that evolved over a very long period of time for some purposes, and we are reappropriating them and putting them to work for this really unnatural activity of looking at printed symbols and converting them into abstract thoughts and concepts. So it's just harder. It just literally requires more work. We've evolved to do conversation. So podcasting is very natural. we're listening to someone talk we have been doing this much much longer than we've been reading so it's much less of a cognitive lift so you're just going to have to do harder cognitive work to read now because of that you get more cognitive conditioning right just like doing pull-ups is going to challenge your muscles more than just going for a walk and so if you're doing a lot of pull-ups you're going to get stronger same thing reading is just really difficult and so it makes your brain stronger now it doesn't mean that listening to a podcast is not

difficult at all. It just uses less energy because we have parts of our brain that are meant to do conversation, that are meant to listen to people talking. But if you're listening to a smart podcast and there's smart ideas being talked about, all right, and you're thinking hard and trying to understand them and integrate them, you're getting a lot of cognitive benefits out of that. So I don't want to give the impression that listening to a podcast or listening to an audiobook is somehow not a not great from a cognitive perspective. I think it's good and challenging and you should do it and it's better than just watching TV and it's much better than just scrolling social media.

But if you really want to put a ranking on it, few things beat reading a hard book from the perspective of getting your brain into shape. Sophie asks, I'm having trouble sticking with my digital detox. I think I made it too unrealistic by setting super strict rules and enabled my own failed attempts. I'm set on doing it for this month, though. If you were to give me a standardized set of, say, three rules to follow, such as daily limit on my phone, what rules would you suggest for increased likelihood of being successful? Sophie, what I learned working on my book digital

minimalism is that if you really have a problem with your phone, if you really find yourself looking at your phone more than you know is useful and more than you know is healthy, if you really want to embrace a more minimalist approach to your digital life. Throwing some rules at the problem is not going to work. And a lot of people want this to be the answer. They want the answer to be turn off notifications, take this app off of your phone, and put this rule into place about how you use that app, and then tomorrow your digital life is overhauled.

But that rarely works, especially for people that are having a real struggle with looking at their screens more than they know is useful or healthy. Now, part of the problem is this white knuckling approach of, I don't like that I'm doing this so much. So I'm just going to try to do it less. I'll put in some rules to help me that to do it less. It's not very persuasive in the long term. Because what happens is in the moment, four days later, five days later,

your brain is like, I'm bored. I really want to see what's going on with Twitter or Instagram. And this general sense of, I think I want to do this less, is not a very compelling argument to overcome that short-term urge. And so you find a way to look at it. So Sophie, what I'd recommend is actually going through with the digital declutter process I talk about in digital minimalism, where what you actually do is step away from everything for 30 days,

everything you can, optional personal technologies, I call it, social media, online news, video games, YouTube, etc. Step away for 30 days. But don't just white-knuckle it. During those 30 days, aggressively through reflection and experimentation, get back in touch with what really matters for you. What are the things you value? Go back to those deep life buckets I talk about on the podcast and on my website and figure and figure out in each of those buckets, what are the things that really moves the needle

that really gives meaning to my life? And then once you figure out what you're actually about, what you want to do, not what you want to avoid, not what you want to do less, but the positive things you want to do, then you reintroduce technology into your life, but this time you say, okay, what is actually going to amplify these things I care about,

and how do I want to use this tech to maximize that amplification and to ignore everything else? Now what you have is a technological life that is built around amplifying things that you truly deeply care about. That is a plan you're much more likely to stick with. Because now when your mind says, oh, maybe we should look at Twitter or Instagram, instead of just saying, well, in general, I want to do that less, your mind is saying, we have a plan based on evidence for how to maximize the quality of our life.

And I'm all in on that plan and it doesn't involve Twitter. So now your brain is in a position of saying, well, do I want to invalidate that whole plan? Do I want to say looking at Twitter is more important than these deep values I'm trying to support? And it says, no, no, I can get on board with. Let's stick with the values. And you don't look at Twitter. So this positive approach, rebuilding your digital life around things that really matter, which includes excluding things that don't support those values, is much more sustainable.

So in digital minimalism, I get real into this. I mean, I had 1,500 people go through this experiment. So I have a lot of data and a lot of experience with it. And Sophie, I got to tell you that's what works. So these rules about what's on my phone, when I check things, how often I check things. These rules are important, but they should come much later in the process. They should come only once you're adding things back into your life specifically to support values. And now you're saying, okay, now I want to optimize my use of this tool to help this value.

What are my rules to do it? That's when these rules come into place at the end, not at the beginning. You'll be more likely to have or enjoy sustainable. change. Okay, a related question. Akil asks, I have just uninstalled my Instagram app because I felt it was too much of a distraction for my work productivity, but still I cannot ignore it and I log in through desktop to check on a daily basis. How to overcome this addiction. Help me if you can. So Akil, in the long term, I'm going to recommend you do the same digital declutter that we were just talking about in my last answer that I described in detail in my book, Digital.

minimalism. But I'm going to give you a short-term piece of advice as well, which is you need to delete your Instagram account. It sounds like you're at a place where it really is a problem. This technology is getting in the way of the things that you value in your life. You're using it more than you want to. You're using more than it is useful. Now, unless you have a business that is built around your Instagram presence, unless you are like a Kardashian or a fitness influencer, I'm 99% sure. Whatever value you're getting out of Instagram, you could replicate in other ways. without these issues of addictive use. So I've met enough people

and worked with enough people on their technological lives to know based on the way you're describing this, here's my tough-love answer. Don't take it off your phone. Don't just try to unbookmark it on your browser. Get it out of your life.

Zuckerberg has enough money. He'll be okay without yours. There's plenty of ways in the world to be entertained or to know what people are doing or to be exposed to interesting ideas. you don't need that particular app. It has no monopoly on any of these benefits. So if you're having trouble with it,

just run away. You will survive. All right, how about we play a quick round of question roulette? This, of course, is a segment where I load up a question randomly that I've never seen before and try to answer it on the fly. You know, I think it's true that basically every question roulette round we have done on this podcast, the questions have all been very reasonable and easily answerable.

So I don't know if I should be grateful for that or if I should wish for more zany questions because the segment would be more interesting. But I think it just underscores what I've been saying, which is the listeners of this podcast to my readers in general are orders of magnitude smarter and more thoughtful, I think, than the typical internet user. So I do appreciate that.

All right. So our question of the day comes from Lillian. And it is, would you please consider adding your podcast to Stitcher? All right. Well, it's not a zany question, but it's not really a deep one. Yes, Lillian, I would consider doing that. Basically, it is my own laziness and lack of time that has limited what I've done with this podcast. I know there's more platforms to add it to.

And I will add it to that. Let's do one more question because that wasn't really, that wasn't really what we would call a deep question. All right. Another random question here. Philip asks, how can you apply deep work methods for collaboration in a small team? Philip elaborates it like me. He is a university professor doing theoretical CS. Well, Philip, the whiteboard effect is very relevant to you.

I talk about this in my book, Deep Work. That's the idea that working with a small group together on a hard problem can push you to deeper levels of concentration that you might, then you might be able to actually achieve on your own. So contrary to the image of the Andrew Wiles in his attic in Princeton, trying to solve Fermat's last theorem all by himself, working with other people can help you concentrate more. We've talked about this before.

It's because first there's the social pressure that if we're all at the whiteboard and I let my attention wander, there's a social price. Because I have to say, hold on a second, guys go back. I missed what you were just saying there. And also there's just the added benefit that other people know other things. So they can help push the idea forward

in places where you might have gotten stuck. So I think multiple minds, especially doing the type of work that you and I do fill up, solving proofs in the theoretical CS perspective, working together with small groups is something that you should actually try to do as much as possible.

Now, if your university is closed right now or like me, you have a lot of international collaborators, you can do this on Zoom. In fact, if you're doing it on Zoom, I really recommend using an iPad and a stylus, hooking into your computer, doing a shared whiteboard screen so that you can take notes. Take that whiteboard from the proverbial whiteboard effect and make it a virtual thing. It really does help. Get together to other people as much as possible. That's actually going to make your work deeper. All right. So thanks for that, Philip. Another successful round of question

roulette. Let's now move on to our final segment, which is questions about the deep life. Amburesh asks, how do I ask the right questions to folks who I want to emulate? So what he's talking about here is my frequent suggestion, especially in the professional context, of trying to actually learn from people who are doing what you one day want to do, who have achieved a professional lifestyle that resonates with you. Learning from them how they actually did that. Getting the hard reality, it might be good news, it might be bad news,

it might be easy, it might be hard, but get the reality of how they actually did that so you know where to focus your efforts. Now, Amberash is asking, okay, let's say I am on board with that strategy and I'm talking to someone who I want to emulate, what do I ask them? Now, that's a really good question.

A lot of people get this wrong. I know a lot about this because I've been writing advice books since I was 21 years old. So if there's one thing that I've done a lot of, it's asking people for advice. And the most consistent thing I've learned is that most people are bad at giving advice. Now, this leads to what I sometimes call the colored folder effect, which is those of you who took the online course I did with Scott. young called Top Performer, you know this effect because in Top Performer, we really get into detail about how to learn from people whose careers resonate and to figure out how they did it and

then create a plan for yourself to follow it in your own career. We have a whole video on the colored folder effects. That actually comes from my experience working on my book, how to become a straight-A student, which I wrote predominantly as a senior in college. and so for this book, the premise was I interviewed real straight A college students and asked them, in essence, what's your advice? Now, what I learned from that process is if you actually ask someone who is doing something right, they're getting straight A's, if you just ask them, how do you do it, you're not going to get a good answer.

Because most people naturally are not good at giving advice. It's unnatural to reflect on your own. your own experience to figure out what matters, what doesn't, to separate correlation from causation. There's an amount of self-reflection and self-awareness required to extract reasonable wisdom from one's own experience that most people just don't have it. And if you put them on the spot, give me advice from your experience. There will be this social pressure if I got to give you some sort of answer and they'll come up with anything that sounds like reasonable advice. And so the term colored folder effects come from this idea that if you put a straight A student on the spot,

and I know this from experience, and say, what's your advice for getting straight A is they're going to grapple and grasp to have something to say, and it might be random what they come up with. It might be the fact that the folders they use to contain their notes are all colored red. Of course, in reality, of course, the fact that their folders are colored red has nothing to do with their academic success, but they're just grasping for some sort of advice to give. So what's the solution to avoiding the colored folder effect? Never ask someone you admire what their advice is. Instead, ask them what their story is.

You want to approach them like you're a journalist that's going to write a profile about their life. Don't trust them to figure out what was important and what was not. Just get them to tell you what they did. How do they get started? How did they move from this position to that position? in that top performer course when we're helping people do these interviews, what we recommend is that you break down the career of the person you're talking to into beats this position,

then that position, then this big project happened, which moved me up on the radar, etc. And for each of those beats, ask, how did you get from here to here? Like, what was the thing that got you from this position to that position?

And then asked the follow up, what was the thing you did that, like, other people who did not get that similar promotion didn't do? So again, you're getting people to tell their story. You're trying to understand the actual activities they did. And then later, like a journalist, you can sift through what you learn to try to pull out the signal on your own. You will be better at actually seen from afar, hmm, this is what seemed to matter.

Then someone put on the spot to self-reflect will actually be able to provide. So be wary of people's advice to buy red folders. Say, forget about your advice. Tell me about how you actually work. And that, of course, is what I ended up doing for the book, how to become a straight A student. I learned right really quick. Don't say, what's your advice for getting straight A's?

What I learned was to say instead, how did you study for the last test that you studied for? Think about the last paper that you handed it. Walk me through how you prepared for it. So the whole foundation of that book became not trying to ask people about their advice, but instead trying to ask them to tell me their story about how they worked. And then I figured out the trends. Once you've looked at how 50 straight A students were,

how they studied for the last test, you begin to notice what's really important, what shows up time and again. And I would say most of those 50 students would not have picked out the signals if just put on the spot. So ignore the red folders, find out how they actually prepared. Shankara asks, how do you deal with psychological hurdles, such as negative self-talk and imposter syndrome in a job that requires deep work? In her elaboration, she clarifies that she is a tenure track professor, roughly contemporaneous with me, roughly the same age and roughly in the same part of her career. Well, I think it's a really good question.

We don't often talk about the psychological aspects of work and success. We tend to just distill it often in the strategies and tactics. So I'm glad we have a chance to do this elaboration. So Shankara, I have three things to mention. one, and this might be obvious, but for some people it's not, especially for men, at least just based anecdotally on people I know, consider professional assistants, especially if you're talking about third wave psychotherapy. I think third wave psychotherapy is incredibly well equipped and incredibly data-backed for dealing

with exactly these type of ruminative sources of psychological distress. If your main issue is rumination, rumination about either self-doubt, self-recrimination, or anxiety about the future, third wave psychotherapy, especially the acceptance commitment therapy framework, is really good at this, right? And so if you were an athlete and you were worried, you were saying, look, I don't think my cardiovascular fitness is not quite where I want it to be. I mean, I'm a skilled, I'm a skilled basketball player, but I'm getting a little bit winded by the third quarter.

It would say, great, you need to get a professional coach that's going to work with you on the track and work on your cardiovascular fitness. Well, look, Shankar, if you make your living with your brain, and in a job that is incredibly difficult because it's fully autonomous, professor life, and cognitive, really demanding, and super competitive. Like, you can lose your job if you don't produce research that hundreds of people cite. You know, it's a really difficult competitive job with a ton of autonomy, and it requires you to think all the time. And by the way, high-level research professorships accidentally biased

towards people who are way more prone for ruminative psychological distress because it's the hyper-powered, high-powered brain in the first place that got them to the job. Well, it turns out when you have that high horsepower, you have the brain that can move a thousand cycles a minute to figure out the physics problem or the new theory. It's kind of hard to shut that one down. That engine gets rolling, it keeps rolling. So it's a hugely common issue in this particular job that you have. So keep that in mind. I mean, you should think about professional psychotherapy, especially again, I really like third wave techniques like acceptance commitment therapy. Think of that as like hiring a conditioning coach if you were an athlete. Second piece of advice, focus on your process.

I do a lot of this, obviously. I think it should be clear from my podcast and writing, but be relentless in your focus on what's my process for maximizing my brain power, producing the smartest possible ideas, minimizing or corraling shallow work to such a degree that its footprint is at least tamed so it can't take over my sort of entire cognitive lifestyle. Focus on process. Be the person in your department who is known for their organization being on top of things and really prioritizing getting after deep thinking. Process focused thinking really does help, really does help pushback, especially against imposter syndrome, which in academia creates these straw men of for these people over there, they just easily have brilliant insights. And I don't, and I don't belong here.

And the key is no one actually just sits around having brilliant insights. If you focus on your process, you can say, actually, I'm pretty good with my process. And it does push back on imposter syndrome. If you know you have a better process than the people over there, you don't feel is inadequate when comparing yourself to them within your brain. And the third advice I would give, and I think this is particularly relevant in academia, is focus on the right scoreboard. It's very tempting the sabotage, the self-sabotage your own academic career by creating a professional scoreboard that has on it the things that you want to matter.

typically there's going to be things that you can control. Like, okay, I'm going to build a scoreboard where what really matters is, are you there for your department, are you really good on committee work, are you running initiatives which are useful to the university, are you helping to organize new conferences, things that you can work really hard on, but also you can control, that there is no competitive aspect where eventually you have to submit that paper and the major journal could reject it. There is no competitive aspect where you're trying to do. trying to solve this proof and you either do or you don't and that person did and you didn't.

Right. So it's very tempting to create a scoreboard that has things on it that are hard, but that you can control. And then to tell yourself, these are the points I care about. And then to start telling yourself stories to justify it. Like, well, these are the things that should matter. And no, I didn't get grants, but you know what? The grant system's not good anyways. Like the grant system is, it's not fair. It's broken. So I shouldn't, that's why I'm not going after grants. And yeah, I'm not publishing much, but, but, you know, it's because it's, publishing is not everything. And what's really important is that I ran this initiative at the university. And you come up with a scoreboard that you can control.

And so you feel better in the short term. But in the long term, your career stalls. And so that's the final piece of advice is you got to focus on the right scoreboard. You know, in research-oriented university, it's going to be important publications. And you can't game it and you can't avoid it. and you can't just reduce it down to a task list. You have to have big ideas. You have to get those ideas polished.

You have to publish those ideas in places where it's hard to publish, and you have to impress people with them. When you go up for tenure, and then later when you go up for full professor, that's the whole ball game. Letters written by experts in your field giving a frank assessment

of your contribution to the field. So once you know that's the scoreboard that matters, and then it's a matter of getting hyper-focused about it, getting yourself fired up about it. You know, deciding like this is what I do. I mean, here's some positive self-talk here. So I'm going to crush this scoreboard. This is what I do, right?

I'm a publication killer, you know. I'm going to get at it. I'm going to get after it. I'm going to think, think, think, think. I'm going to push it and I'm going to push more hours and I'm going to, whatever. I keep coming back to it again and again and again. I'm going to read the hardest papers, just this confidence. Like, I am going to produce.

really good stuff. And you have just this scoreboard that you can have a single-minded focus on. The professors that have that single-minded focus on that one scoreboard that actually matters tend to do much better than the professors who say, I think I'm going to create other scoreboards that are safer.

This is why, by the way, academia accidentally biases towards jerks, right? And if you're a blowhard, if your self-confidence is way higher than it actually has the right to be, if you're pretty convinced that you're, you know, God's gift to earth, that confidence, unfortunately,

for the sanity of everyone else at the faculty meeting, that confidence does really well because it really helps you look at that scoreboard and say, I'm going to crush this, I can do it, and just go after it, you go after it, you go after it, and you just begin to put points up in those points for what matters. So basically the rest of us, who aren't naturally like that,

have to try to foster in ourselves, carefully foster in ourselves, this sort of killer instinct of I can publish, I can publish good stuff. I belong at this table. I am a good publisher. I'm smart. I'm good.

I'm going to nail this again and again and again. So you have to sort of develop that killer instinct, just like I'm thinking about, for using a sports analogy, the Michael Jordan series, the ESPN series, the last dance. This was like Michael Jordan's mentality was more points. We're going to win.

We're going to find a way to win. That's what I do. I win. I'm going to get points on. it one way or the other and we're going to win. So somehow getting that Jordan S. killer instinct about your publications, not about other people. You don't want to actually be a jerk.

But getting that killer instinct about your publications, that really matters too. So that's my three suggestions. Third wave psychotherapy can be like your conditioning coach. Obsess about processes. It's going to make you feel better. Focus on the scoreboard that actually matters. And if you're not naturally, a sort of semi-sociable, jerk like a lot of star academics are,

you have to foster just a little bit of that in yourself because you've got to have that killer instinct and do not get distracted by the scoreboards that you want to be true because just because you want to be true doesn't mean that those points are going to count in the end. And Jervis asks, how does one go about deep learning? Well, Jervis, my friend Scott Young,

last year actually published a book about this. I gave him the title and the title is ultra-learning. It's a very classic Newportian title, but it's a great book. So this is Scott Young's whole thing. He takes on these really hard learning challenges and does them in incredible amounts of time. So this whole book is about how do you take something very difficult to learn and learn it really quickly. So he's great at that.

So look at his book, Ultra Learning, and his blog gets into a lot of this as well. we actually Scott and I I mean we'll be talking about this more soon so Scott and I did this online course years ago called top performer that looked at basically my book so good they can't ignore you so it's about career success very popular course thousands of people have gone through it we've been working for over a year now on a new course that's going to bring in deep work digital minimalism and his latest ultra learning and I'll be announcing this we'll be talking about it soon. We're going to launch it at the end of the summer. It seemed like an appropriate time to do it. We're calling it a life of focus. But anyways, keep an eye out for that because that course has a whole month where you're doing nothing but basically mastering the ability to learn hard things really quickly using the type of ideas that Scott talks about in ultra learning. Rafael asks, how do I balance productive intake of information, leisurely media consumption, and solitude? How can I tell if I need more solitude in my life.

So in this elaboration, he says, for example, if I'm going for a walk, how do I know if I should listen to a podcast or just be alone with my own thoughts? Well, when it comes to solitude, Raphael, what I recommend is that you want to get a little bit of solitude every day. Where again, solitude means, as you said,

time alone with your own thoughts. The way I define it is time free from inputs from other minds. So not listening to anything. not looking at anything, not talking to anyone. You with your own thoughts, looking at the world around you. You got to have some every day. You know, get your vitamin D, get your vitamin C, get your vitamin S, as for solitude. If you're getting a little bit every day.

So that means basically like you have one or two activities in which you will get solitude. And at least one of them should be like five or two minutes long, then you're probably good. And you can think of it as like, I got enough solitude. And so you don't need to worry beyond that about getting more. but I do recommend on roughly a one week or maybe every other week basis having also a much longer dose of solitude. So a hike or a long walk that lasts at least an hour where it is just you and your own thoughts and observing the world around you. So that's my solitude prescription. A little bit every day, at least once a week or maybe once every two weeks, a really long

dose of solitude should be enough. So if you're doing that, you don't have to worry that you're going for another walk, like, should I be doing more solitude? Like, no, I got my solitude in today. I'm okay. More generally, when it comes to high quality leisure, it just be intentional is the rule. Okay, what do I want to do with my time outside of work? Just give it a little bit of thought. And you'll come up with a much better mix of high quality leisure activities than if you just sort of rock and roll. I'm bored. Let me put on Netflix. And I want to really give it much more thought than that right now. So have your daily dose of vitamin, weekly megadose, and try to be intentional, like give a little bit of thought to what you

want to do with your leisure time. Like, oh, I want to go for this walk. I like this audio book. It's good for me. So I'm going to listen to that audio book on that walk. And then I'm going to come back and I'm going to whatever, whittle in my woodshed. I'm being a little bit facetious here. But you get the idea. So be intentional. Have daily dose of solitude, weekly megadose. And you will be fine. and Jerry asked, can you have too much autonomy? Now, he's referencing my book so good they can't ignore you where I call autonomy the dream job elixir. You know, I say in that book, there's a few things to give people more

sustainable satisfaction in their work than having say over what they work on, how they work on it, and when they work on it. And on the flip side, a lack of autonomy, so not having a lot of control about what you work on or how you work, on it or when you work on it, that can make you quite miserable, regardless of the actual content of the work. So Jerry is asking, okay, can you have too much autonomy? And I think the answer is, oh yeah, autonomy is tough, right? If you don't have any, you're miserable. But if you have complete autonomy, people get miserable as well. You know, it's like, hey, you do whatever you want to do,

you know, work when you want to work on what you want to work on, no pressure, no structure. that can be really difficult. Grad students have big trouble with this. PhD students in particular have a lot of trouble with the massive autonomy you have as a PhD student, especially once you're done with your classes, and it pushes them the weird places where having this complete autonomy, it makes them miserable, and then they try to create these whole dissertation hell cultures where somehow this idea of like all you have to do is work on this one paper for years is somehow a giant burden and terrible.

That's just because it's just a really tough. have full autonomy. So Jerry, yeah, autonomy is really, really hard. So you have to couple increase autonomy with increased intentional structure to your work. You really got to know what you're about and get after it. So the more autonomy you get in your work, the more you have to structure that autonomy. Here's how I run my day. Here's what I work on. Here's my metrics. Here's what I'm tracking. Here's my quarterly plan. Here's my weekly plan. Here's my daily time block plan. I have a war council with these other people that I know peers in the field where we get together once a month and really try to bounce off each other ideas and our strategies and get feedback. And you know, you got to add that structure.

And so that's what I would say is autonomy is a dream job elixir, but only to the extent that you take it with a chaser of self-imposed structure. And sometimes that seems a little bit counterintuitive. Like, well, if I put structure in place, then what's the point of having autonomy? but structure that you put in place yourself is not the same thing as structure that's put in place on your behalf. Optional structure that you're putting in place to optimize something you think is important is going to make you feel better. Structure put in place arbitrarily by someone else because it makes their life easier is going to make you miserable. All right. So don't don't conflate those two.

Structure your autonomy yourself. Be willing to, of course, change and adjust that structure as you get more evidence about how. how things are going and what matters. That combination, the elixir plus the chaser of structure, that's where you really begin to get the benefits of autonomy. But just keep in mind, the more autonomy you get, so the stiffer that shot, the stronger or more effort that chaser is going to require.

Yucco asks, who will do the shallow work you dismissed while you focus on the deep pursuits? Do you care about it at all? Now, you go, I get a fairly steady stream of similar questions. Typically, the person is very upset. And typically, I'm often quite confused about what is actually being asked. So what I want to try to do here is figure out what's going on.

Like, what is this actual question? Let me try to get past my confusion and see if we can find some common ground on which we can actually make some progress. So let me start with my initial instinct of confusion. The core concept behind deep work was the following, that when you're working, and particularly in office works, like a knowledge work, we tended recently just to treat all work the same, and therefore just focus on doing as much as possible or being busy, you know, just work hard, be busy, be motivated. And this didn't seem to be actually producing results.

People are getting miserable, non-industrial productivity metrics were stagnating. And the core concept of deep work is we shouldn't treat all work efforts the same in the office context. We should actually split out deep work efforts, which is where you're concentrating hard on something and not context shifting from other efforts, the administrative or logistical efforts like email and meetings and these type of things. And my point is in most knowledge work jobs, the effort that most effectively actually produces the thing that in the end you're selling, the thing that actually produces money for your organization, is deep work. And once you recognize that, you stop saying, let's just all work is the same and let's be busy, and you start to figure out how can I get that ratio better?

Maybe I should do less the shallow and more of the deep. Then in the same amount of time, so in that same eight hours you're at the office, you produce more value. Now, so where does that shallow work go? Well, for the most part, nowhere. It doesn't, for the most part, move on to someone else. When people begin to recognize deep work as more important than shallow

or needs to have some priority. A couple things happen. One, they get more structured and efficient about their shallow work. So instead of letting it just casually fill their day inefficiently, which is what you would do if it's just busyness as busyness, work is work, why bother being organized? Why bother trying to be efficient about your shallow work? You just have your eight hours you're punching in and you want to be busy.

But once you recognize like, oh, the shallow gets in the way of the deep, and the deep is what moves the needle. Now you use capture, now you use configure, now you use control, you use control, you know, now you get serious about time blocking, you get serious about weekly and quarterly planning, now you get serious about systems. You're not just throwing inefficient emails back and forth all day. You have repeatable ways of handling given processes. And the footprint of the shallow work gets much smaller. Now, the other thing that happens here is that if you're entrepreneurial, so if you're running your own company, this recognition that deep work is what

moves to needle means that you might assess how you're spending your time and realize, okay, here's five or six shallow activities that I really don't need to be doing. The company does not need to be doing these things. I took these on just because I was nervous and I wanted to crush it. I wanted to hustle and leave no stone on turn. And that all makes sense. But once you recognize that, yeah, but if I stop doing X, Y, and Z altogether and reinvested that time into the deeper pursuits that move the needle, then actually my company is going to grow faster. And then the final thing that happens is just that shallow work gets batched better. So a key notion of deep work is that context switches have a lot more damage than we realized.

So if you check your inbox for five minutes five times, it might take you two hours to get something done because every time you check the inbox, it changes your context, your cognitive context, and there's a cost to try to switch it back, which. slows down your actual, the rate at which you're able to produce work. So maybe it takes you two hours to finish something because you check your inbox five times, five minutes at a piece. If you instead take those same 25 minutes worth of email checks and just spend 25 minutes, you just handle the email, you spend a half hour, you get all done, and then you focus without

distraction on the hard task. You could probably get that same thing done now in one hour without the cognitive switching. So again, recognizing that deep work is more important to shallow work, part of it is also just batching the shallow instead of trying to spread it out over the deep. And you end up using much less time total to get the same amount of work done. So I always thought about deep work as saying, okay, given your existing work day, how do you make the most out of it? Which is why I got surprised when I would start to get critiques like, well, wait a second, who's watching the kids while you're doing deep work? You know, I would honestly be confused. I would think, well, I don't normally have my kids.

at my office. So, I mean, I don't, I don't know what batching my emails while I'm at my office or, you know, spending my mornings on deep work and consolidating my meetings in the afternoon. What does this have to do with my kids? Like, what am I doing new here that is objectionable? So I used to be very confused about this. So then what I started doing is talking to people. when someone like Yucco would send me a question and be real upset, I would then write back and say, let's elaborate. Or when I be an event and someone would bring something like this up, I would say, tell me more.

And not a Twitter conversation, not in this simplistic world of there's good guys and bad guys, and let's dunk on the bad guys, and if you're the first person to figure out a flaw, you get the reward. Like, none of this Twitter nonsense. Let's talk. Long emails. Long conversations.

But discoverers, there's an interesting undercurrent going on here, which is that once you are, once you recognize, once you learn that focused work produces so much value than other efforts, right? That deep work is like what really moves the needle. Once you've been, you know, deep-pilled, you know, we can call it, like, oh, I see the matrix now, It's not just getting after it. It's not just being busy. Like this stuff produces new value and this stuff is, you know, keeps the lights on, but it's not nearly as important. This can actually generate a strong sense in frustration in people

because a lot of people then their next step is recognizing, oh, wait a second. Access to this is not equal. Now, the effects here are often kind of subtle, but I think they're profound. So it turns out, for example, that when you're just thinking about, you know, two people who are at the office for the same number of hours doing the same job, being a bit of a jerk suddenly becomes a big advantage. You're like a blustering blowhard jerk.

You can ignore people's emails. You can say no to things. People aren't going to ask you to do things. You know, non, non-deep related but useful office administrative efforts. Like, my God, I don't want to bother. asking Richard about this. Like he's just going to, A, he's a pain. And, you know, B, he's not going to do it.

And now suddenly you have access to more undistracted work. You're able to produce more value. Your career moves ahead faster than the other person who maybe is equally as capable, but has in this scenario, the fatal flaw being nice. Like, I care about my coworkers. I want to help. You begin to think about examples like that.

Or you're an academic, and you look to academia. I mean, look, there used to be this effect. At MIT, I saw this for sure. I called it the 10-year baby effect, where these young professors would have their first babies like roughly nine months after they get tenure. As because they knew, okay, I have to be obsessively locked in the deep work

pre-tenure if I'm going to get tenure. But guess what? That's going to be easier for some people than others. you know, if you already have kids, you're kind of screwed. If you're a husband and wife and you have a kid earlier, probably the wife's going to end up doing more of that child care. Now you have a huge advantage of the guy. Like you can just be up late at the lab, those deep work hours.

You get huge advantage. And a lot of other examples like this. I did some work at a law firm. I've talked about this at the podcast before. I did some work at a major law firm. They were having this problem. And they read deep work and they had a women's group that did monthly book. books, like a book club, and they read deep work.

And in particular, they had become talk. And in particular, the main issue they saw is exactly this blowhard issue. That either the partners that were blowhards or the partners that were weird. You know, like socially weird, but like, you know what? Hey, he's got, he's great at real estate law. Weird guy. Weird guy, but brilliant. They're kind of left alone.

They skyrocket up the ranks, right? And the people who are not weird and the people who are not blowhards. they end up doing a lot more of the administrative work. They say yes more often their career suffers, right? So there's this effect that I learned about talking to people, which is like once you have seen the deep work matrix, then you realize all the ways that that's going to create unfairness until we all just recognize and talk explicitly about this is what's valuable.

This is what we protect. We've set up our institution so that people can do this. It's our priority. We want to measure it. We want to manage for it. everyone has a deep to shallow ratio. We want to do what we can to have them hit the ratio. When we don't do that, we obfuscate that.

We treat everyone as black boxes. We say we give them their assignments. We give them motivation. And they produce results. And that black box is producing more results than that black box. And so great, that person gets to promotion. And when we just do that, you don't end up actually doing what's best for your organization. You leave a lot of talent on the table or hold it back.

And it can be an intensely frustrating experience. So again, this completely surprised me at first. I just, I didn't understand. It's like, what is like doing more deep work and less shallow work in your own work? Like, well, how does change in your work habits hurt someone else? Why would that make you mad? But this is what's underneath it. It's like ignorance is bliss.

When you don't recognize, you just, I don't know that this activity is really secretly way, way valuable and largely this has been ignored, then it sort of ignorance is bliss. Like, I don't know, we're all just trying to crush it. We're all just trying to work hard. And then once you actually see behind a curtain and say, oh, not all efforts are made equal. As soon as you learn that, it's hard to ignore the ways then when you are getting the seventh committee request, the 10th serviced assignment of the month because you play ball and you're nice. Now you actually recognize the damage that's causing to your career.

And now you see the inequity of the weird guy who like starts to shake, you know, if you put him on a committee and no one bothers them, is getting 10 or two years earlier because no one's bothering them. Like you see all this suddenly becomes clear, right? So I think that's what's going on. And so I'm glad you go asked this question because I think it's an important dynamic. Because I think it confuses a lot of other people who maybe come at deep work and they say, yeah, it's great. I'm going to be better with my habits. And other people like, oh man, knowing about this makes me really upset. think it's important to understand why that is. And I think this underscores the point that I think

is at the core of my work on technology and work, which is everything is better when you recognize, except publicly talk about, and actually intentionally plan your organizations and institutional habits around the reality of how the brain produces valuable stuff in the knowledge era. We've got to stop obfuscating. We've got to stop just avoiding dealing. with it because the way we do work now is easy. We're on email. We're on Zoom. We're on Slack.

We just rock and roll. Hey, can you do this? What about this? Can you hop on a call? I want to circle back on this. It's just easy in the moment. But it's not the best way to distribute resources. And when you when you distribute cognitive resources haphazardly,

that distribution is not going to be optimal. It's not going to be equal. For some people, it might be great. And for other people, it's going to frustrate the hell out of them. And I don't think we should have. ignore that frustration. And I think clarity is important. I think accepting and acknowledging the reality of how work actually happens is important. And so hopefully the type of things I talk about on this podcast, the type of things I write about in my books, the type of things I write about in my

article, in my newsletter, I'm hoping this is seeding these ideas out there into the broader culture and that more and more people can then bring this up in their own workplace. Deep work is different than shallow work. Deep work is what moves the needle. deep work is what is incredibly fulfilling. What are we doing as an organization to prioritize deep work and to make sure that we are allowing everybody to do the amount of deep work that is optimal for them? How do we make sure that we are not leaving any cognitive resources on the table?

How do we make sure that we are not allowing haphazard, implicit arbitrary standards decide who gets to do this and who doesn't? This is the core to success in the knowledge of confidence. ignoring that's not going to help. But if we embrace it and if we embrace this reality and we rebuild the way we think about work around it, I think everyone's going to end up much better. All right. Well, there we go. Another unintentional rant has often happens in the podcast. So I should probably leave things here so I can cool off. And I mean that actually literally because I turn off the air conditioner in my studio when I record for sound purposes. So like I literally need to

cool off. But I think we had a good batch of questions today. Thank you everyone who sent in their questions. Again, if you want to submit your own questions, callnewport.com, you can sign up for my mailing list and look for my next question survey. If you want to submit an audio question, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport. Until next time, as always, stay deep.