Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 191: Can We Fix the Internet?

Episode Date: April 18, 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/calnewportmediaQUESTIONS:- How do I stick with just one organization system? [3:38]- How do I maintain a routine in a job with wildly changing demands? [9:00]- Cal Reacts to the News: Is Twitter Ruining Society? [23:30]- How do I apply your ideas to skilled labor? [44:14]- How do I cure my current feeling of burnout? [49:25]- Should I focus on process or results-focused goals? [1:01:51]Thanks to our Sponsors:Blinkist.com/DeepAthleticGreens.com/DeepLadderLife.com/DeepHeadspace.com/QuestionsThanks 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 Question. Episode 191. I'm here in my Deep Work H.Q. By myself, Jesse has abandoned me this week for a no good reason. The lacrosse team, he helps coaches on the road. They're playing in a tournament. What I've told Jesse one thing, I've told him this a thousand times. the youth of this country are a distraction that get in the way of what matters,

which is middle-aged men talking about productivity. I don't know when that lesson is going to sink in. Now, I warned everyone. I warned everyone last time Jesse was gone that if he was gone again, I was going to create a Jesse scarecrow and put that in his chair so that we could keep going in our old style. I have followed through on that threat. Say hi to everyone, Jesse Scarecrow.

Hi, Cal. It's me, me, Jesse. Well, Jesse, good to see you dressed up for the episode today. What's on your mind? Well, I just wanted to say, compared to you, Mahatness Gandhi and Mother Teresa are garbage people. Oh, Jesse, that is, I think that's too extreme.

I try to do what I, I try to do what I can. But, you know, I'm not that great. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Here's the thing. I am in my 40s. You are only in your 30s. So I am clearly much older than you. So I speak from wisdom when I, when I would say they are garbage people compared to you

because you give advice that's good about time management. Well, Jesse, I think we're going too far. here. No, no. And I also want to say to Brandon Sanderson, if Cal says you wrote name of the win, then that's what you wrote. And I don't want to hear anything else about it. All right. Well, I appreciate that, Jesse. Now, for those of you who are listening and not watching the YouTube feed and therefore are missing these beautiful shots of Jesse Scarecrow, good for you. Good for you. Do not watch it. This is nonsense. This is shenanigans. All right, I'm here by myself. I have about a 50% chance of successfully recording this video properly. I keep looking to the side the YouTube

viewers will notice because I keep checking to see if everything's working. I mean, there's a 50% chance that I will fail to record this episode properly. There's a 30% chance that there will be like a 20 minute period in which it's just showing Jesse Scarecrow because I forgot to change the camera. So that's what we're dealing with today, but I'll do my best. I want to try something different, why not? I have a good segment, deep dive style segment, a Cal reacts to the new segment where I'm going to react to John Heights new article about social media undermining democracy, but I figured why don't we try something different? Dave Ramsey style, I'm going to jump straight in the questions. We'll get to this segment in a little bit. So let's just get started,

rock and rolling with some questions. We'll get to the longer segment later. All right, well, the honor of asking the first question in today's episode goes, to Steve. Steve asks, how do I stick with just one organization system? How can I stick to a system, a paper digital? I go through different seasons where I'm into either digital organization or working with paper and pen. What's been working generally is time blocking in a notebook, keeping appointments on a calendar,

but I would like to somehow settle so I'm not expending so much effort on redoing my system. Steve, good question. Here's what I want you to keep in mind. Going from no organizational system to some sort of organizational system that you've thought about, you know, maybe it's built off of the principles I write about, is a big win. That will make a big difference in your life.

On the other hand, going from an organizational system, a smart organizational system, to a different smart organization. organizational system that you've optimized or tweaked or changed is going to have a small impact on the quality and quantity of what you are able to produce. Now, there is pleasure, of course, in coming up with new systems that is just isolated from the actual impact of the system. If you're like me and I think you are, it feels good to think about the different ways the

pieces of your new system are going to hook together, this notebook with this pin and I'm going hook it into a remarkable tablet, and then that remarkable tablet is going to be FedEx to a skywriter who's going to put my most important task of the day into the sky with smoke. It feels good to see all the pieces of the new system, all the pieces of the new system hooked together, but it's not going to make a big difference. And so I think you are right to be worried that if you are continually updating your system, you're actually getting in the way of getting the work done that that system is supposed to help. So I want to break you out of that cycle.

I'm going to give you a bare bones vanilla, but will work just fine combination of tools to implement my system. And I'm going to ask for you to use it for six months without changing it. All right. So here's the bare bones version of my system I want you to use. Digital calendar. All right. So appointments can go on your calendar. Paper time blocking.

You've been using a paper notebook. That's fine. You can use my time block plan. at timeblockplanter.com to find out more about that. But a notebook you can bring with you for time blocking each day. Tasks and weekly plans, whatever system you want. So you can use Trello, you can use an online to-do list. You can use a notebook if you want.

I don't care. Weekly plans, just use a text file or a Google Doc. Do the same for quarterly plans. All right? So digital calendar, paper time blocking, weekly quarterly plan. plans, you know, whatever, Google Docs, text files, and whatever task management system you want. I don't really care. But you're going to stick with what you choose for six months.

Again, for those who don't know my system, go to the core ideas video on time management at the YouTube page, YouTube.com slash Kalnewport Media. Maybe avoid this episode so you can avoid seeing the terrifying Jesse Scarecrow. What do you mean terrifying? I'm not terrifying. Come on, Jesse Scarecrow. We're upsetting our viewing audience. Steve, so you have that system.

Use it for six months. When you have that urge, like, I want to fiddle with the system, put that urge into creating something new. Put that urge into making the pieces of an idea fit together, a new business strategy fitted together, a new high-quality leisure activity that requires complex fiddling. You're building things. You're making things.

Find another outlet for that urge to get the pleasure that comes from pieces clicking together. And then after six months, if you want to change your system again, go ahead. But here's what I think you're going to find. Six months of not changing your system. I feel it's secure that it's good enough because I told you it is. That's fine. It'll be fine.

There's not some major benefit you're going to get compared to that vanilla system I just gave you. After six months, you're probably going to say, you know what? I found other outlets for that energy. I have more interesting and important things to focus my energy on then fixing my system. Right now, it's a hobby of yours. Find another hobby so that. you can actually focus your energy when you're working on actually working and not trying to get these systems to function correctly.

All right, so we got another question here. This one, ooh, hold on, I'm clicking. This is, there we go. This is scintillating, by the way, for the viewing audience and the listening audience, these moments of silence. I'm actually clicking, I'm adjusting our recording software. Jesse does all this normally. So you got to, you got to give you some rope.

Why can't I do it now? Scarecrow Gessy, you have no arms. So I have to do this. And so sometimes I have to go and click and change things because I'm not great at doing this on my own anymore. And so everyone will have to bear with me. But we're making progress. So let's move on now to our next question.

It comes from Dan. Dan asks, How do I maintain a routine in a job that has wildly changing demands? So he goes on to say, I'm a professional landscape photographer and my job consists of periods of admin work from home mixed with multiple national and international trips around the world, staying out of home for periods from two weeks to one to two months. Deep work and deep life are very important for my job and health. And I try to follow all the principles that you show us in your books and podcasts. However, when I get home after every trip, it takes me a long time until I'm back on track.

I do yearly, quarterly, monthly, and weekly plans, but even so I'm not consistent. It takes me at least two weeks until I'm fully immersed again. Two quick points down before we get into the meat of it. Number one, what goes on in landscape photography? Two months international trips for landscape photography? I have to say, I really do not understand what landscape photography means. but it sounds like it is arguably a much cooler job than I imagined, or more likely you are clearly a highly trained international spy and assassin,

and this is your cover. So you're just telling your friends and family, yeah, I have to go to Yemen for two months to do landscape photography. Yeah, well, I need that tuxedo. and those two guns and the watch with the garot wire that pulls out of it because of the demands of landscape photography. So clearly you're a spy, but it's a good question to ask.

The other point I want to make before I get into it, though, is yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, a little excessive. I don't usually recommend doing monthly if you're doing quarterly. I think daily, weekly, quarterly is good. So you're doing a lot of planning. But again, as an international spy assassin using landscape photography as your cover, maybe your life is more complicated. All right, let's get to your solution here, though, your solution here, which is your job has a feature that is good that I like, that I want more people to have in their jobs. And when you recognize this feature, it's going to take off a lot of the stress you feel about managing your work.

And that feature is seasonality. Now, seasonality to me, when I talk about seasonality and work, and I think I get into this, for example, in my video on slow productivity, so the core idea is slow productivity video on the YouTube channel is it's where you have different seasons of your work year. And different seasons feel different and are treated differently. You know, as a professor, for example, my job is naturally seasonal. Okay? So there are, for example, low intensity periods like the summer.

I mean, in the summer, I'm on 10-month salary. In the summer, I pay my own salary. As I've mentioned before, most R1 university professors are going to take summer salary from grants, which is what I did when I was lean up to tenure, and you're just doing research in the summer. Now, as a tenured professor and writer, I pay my own salary. the summer. So like I do, I'm kind of free from Georgetown in the summer. Now, compare that to like last month at the height of the spring semester. I'm co-sharing a cluster hire. I'm on another hiring

committee. Incredibly intense. It's a completely different season. You know, I think this is good. I think it's highly artificial, this idea that your work should be at exactly the same level of intensity and load all year round, with the exception of weekends, two weeks of vacation. That's not very natural. That's not the way we evolved. We evolved to have heavier periods and lighter periods. There's the fall when we're harvesting in the summer and the winter where the fields are fallow. I mean, this is what we're used to. And I think we should have more of that back. So you have a seasonal job. And your job in particular has three seasons, which show up a lot in seasonal jobs. So I'm going to give them names. Season one, the at home steady state. You're at home.

You're not out on your assignments where you're traveling. You have a lot of. a lot of logistical work to do. You have admin to do contracts and your website up to date, processing whatever photos from another trip. Whatever it is, you do as a landscape photographer, marketing, drumming up new business, calls, quotes, you know, whatever, however that business works. Then you have the seasons where you're on the road. These are the periods where you're traveling. You're in the middle of an engagement. This is where you've told everyone your landscape photography, doing landscape photography for two months overseas. Yeah, right. You're really a sassage. people with garot wire, but whatever, you're on the road.

And then the third common season or period for you is what I will call the post-trip recovery. You just got back from a trip. You have literally assassinated dozens of people. You're exhausted. It's mentally demanding. And you can't just, you find it difficult to fall right back into, maybe on email and Zoom and answering, you know, client inquiries all day. Treat each of those seasons differently.

When I say treat it differently, have different. routines and rules that you deploy, routines and rules, and maybe we'll throw in their standards that you deploy for each of those seasons. So the way you handle the at-home admin period is going to be very sort of Cal Newport in the middle of the semester style. Your quarterly plan influences your weekly plan. You make a good weekly plan to weekly plan influences your daily time block plan. You're working for set hours, maybe six to eight hours a day. You're using your time well, schedule shutdown complete to differentiate between work and non-work. This sort of standard steady-state Caldunuport stuff.

You're getting stuff done, but you're not overwhelmed. You're full capture, so you're not too stressed, but making progress on lots of things. Great. When you're on the road, during those seasons, it's probably very different. You batten down the hatches. I mean, if this is demanding, which it seems like it is, you have procedures for this. People know that you can't be reached unless it's an emergency. You're bouncing back inquiries, so there's not email inboxes that are picking up.

You're careful not to have ongoing unreasonable. related projects that require tending while you're away, so you can really give your full attention to wink, wink, wink, landscape photography. And then I think you should have this post-trip recovery season where you say, I'm done with the trip, but I need two weeks. I need two weeks. And you have a completely different standard for those two weeks. Maybe it's like you take two days completely off with your family.

In the next three days, it's like one hour every morning to start getting your arms around processing the photos or like some sort of. admin that is generated as annoyance. You're kind of spreading it out. And like one hour of emergency email or beginning to like rebuild your recovery list. Like you maybe just have like a couple hours of work you do a day. And then the next week it's it's like three hours, but no projects. It's, it's, you're recovering. And then the third week after that, that recovery has slowly gotten you up to the place where now you can jump back into your admin season. So I would say lean into the fact that your job feels different at different times and optimize your rules, rituals,

and standards for each of those times. In general, everyone who is able to have this type of autonomy of the work should think about it this way. And I think steady state, intense period, recovery period, those are three pretty generally applicable seasons for like lots of people. If you're a freelancer or you run your own solopreneur business or you run a small company or you have a lot of autonomy on your team or you're a professor or a writer, think about steady, state, intense periods, recovery periods. It's three different types, three different types of work, and you treat each of them differently.

I think it's much more interesting, much more sustainable, much more natural than just let me be at this 80% mark every single day, eight hours, fully time blocked day after day after day, week after week after week, month after week, month after month. All right, so as mentioned, I do want to do a, deep dive segment here, in particular a Cal reacts to the new segment. John Haidt has this big,

splashy new Atlantic article titled, the online version is titled, why the past 10 years of American life has been uniquely stupid. It's a big anti-social media polemic. This is like put it in my veins type content and I want to get into it. But first, let us hear from a couple of the sponsors that make the deep questions podcast possible. Start by talking about Blinkist, a longtime sponsor of the show.

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Oh, 7,000 five-star reviews recommended by professional athletes, trusted by health experts such as Tim Ferriss and Michael Jervais. sounds good to me. So I am one of those experts too, I suppose. But anyways, it's what I take. It's what I use. I don't want to bother with supplements. I don't want to bother with vitamins. God forbid, I don't want to go to G&C.

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the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. I thought of greens. Scarecrow, Jesse, what do you do for your nutrition every day? Well, I, uh, I slaughter and eat a live rabbit once a day. And I drink the yolks of half a dozen eggs with every meal. Scarecrow, Jesse, I don't know. That doesn't seem very healthy. Uh, maybe athletic greens would be easier for you.

don't tell me, don't tell me what supplements I can use. Live rabbit, devoured, half dozen egg yolks every meal. That is the solution. Well, to each their own, I will say, though, you have no arms or legs. So I'm not sure if I would take health advice from you. All right. So let's do a Cal reacts to the news segment. As promised, I want to talk about this article from the Atlantic online.

It's titled Why the Past Ten Years of American Life has been uniquely stupid. In the magazine, it was called After Babbel and is an epic article by, I can say friend of the show. What I mean is someone that people who listen to this show enjoy John Haidt. So I've talked to John Haight once or twice.

I don't know him well, but I really respect his, really respect his work. Because he has psychology training. He can work with literatures in an academic way, but also has a real mind-tort. cultural criticism and public-facing work, which I think is great. So I'm a big John Haidt fan. So I was excited to see this article.

I'm going to read just a few highlights. Some highlighted sentences from this article, then I'm going to give you some thoughts on it. All right. So one thing he says here is something went terribly wrong with very suddenly with America into 2010s. As he clarifies in the first decade of the new century. so the 2000 to the late 2000, like 2009, 2010,

social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. Height argues the high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the era of spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. He goes on, however, to say, okay, and he clarifies also, in their early incarnations, platforms such as MySpace and Facebook were relatively harmless, They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and link to mostly static pages of their friends and favorite fans. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression

of technological improvements from the postal service through the telephone to email and texting, all of which helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties. All right? So John Haidt is setting things up where there's going to be this fall in the 2010s. And in the first decade of the 2000s, basically we are in a more eidonic, edinic time where social media was great. It was helping people connect to their friends and bands and get new information. It was helping to overthrow dictators and everyone's really happy. And what he argues is there was a major change.

So what was this major change that happened to social media that set up the fall that he talks about in this piece? Well, he goes on to give his theory. He says, okay, look, in 2009 and before, if you're on Facebook, you had a simple timeline, a never-ended stream of content generated by friends and connections with the newest post at the top and the oldest at the bottom. That began the change in 2009 when Facebook offered users a way to publicly like post with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful, the retweet button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it. with all their followers.

Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own share button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. Like and share buttons quickly became standard on most social media platforms. Shortly after its like button began to produce data about what best engaged its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user

the content most likely to generate a like or some other interaction, eventually including the share as well. By 2013, social media had become a new game, the dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would go viral and make you internet famous for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried and hateful comments.

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics. Users were guided not just by their true preferences, but by their past experiences of reward and punishment and the prediction of how others would react to each new action. So that is the story that Haight tells for what is essentially the fall of social media, the fall from grace of social media. So this is a story. It's a tale of techno-determinism. I talk about this in digital minimalism.

I've talked about this in an article I wrote for the communications of the ACM. It's a point I've been making a lot recently, which is we have to be incredibly aware of unintentional techno-social dynamics where a technology introduced for one period can have massive influences that we weren't expecting. We should be monitoring those and aware of those. those and reacting to those. We often don't. And as Haidt says, this is what happened with the like and retweet button.

It completely changed the character of social media. Or social media used to be about connecting to people, posting information and connecting. It became instead about viral dynamics. What's going to be a hit? What is going to avoid me being attacked? You don't have that without retweet. You don't have that without likes. But once it became this algorithmic stream with viral dynamics, it completely changed the character.

It wasn't the intention, as I talk about in my book, Digital Minimalism, the intention of the like button originally was that engineers thought it was not elegant that someone would post a photo on Facebook and so many comments would say more or less the same thing. Awesome, cool, great, good. I'm like, well, let's just put a like a like button in so that if all you're going to say is like, that's great, just click that button and we'll count up how many people said that so that you don't have to waste time scrolling through comments that are all just simple positive affirmations.

That was the point of the like button, but almost immediately it completely changed the dynamics of Facebook because, A, it made it more addictive because you began to care about how many likes your things got. And B, it gave them data that they could use to create algorithmically generated streams, which broke the whole model of, I know you. And Facebook is great because I can see what you're up to. And made into this model of, oh, my God, what am I seen in my news feed? This is interesting.

This is outrageous. this is emotionally engaged and it completely changed the dynamic. So is that a bad thing? Well, Height says it's undermining democracy. It is like one of the worst things to happen is the social media platforms going towards this optimized streams that create equipped with or augmented with viral dynamics. He gives three things he said went wrong once we switch to this. Number one, it gave more power to tools and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. number two, this approach gave more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing

the power and voice of the moderate majority. Because again, you have viral dynamics in terms of both praise and attack, you migrate to the extremes. A, you're not going to get shared for saying things moderate, and two, the extremes are going to be motivated to pile on or try to attack people that seem like they're drifting from it. he cites the pro-democracy group more in common. Very important survey. Back in 2017, they surveyed 8,000 Americans,

and they split the Americans up into seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. And they found that devoted conservatives comprised 6% of the U.S. population. And the group furthest to the left, what they called progressive activists, comprised just 8% of the population. and the progressive activists in particular were the most prolific group on social media.

70% had shared political content of the previous years, and the devoted conservatives were also very active on social media. At least 56% had shared political content. And the irony he points out is that those two groups tend to be both richer than the average American and wider than the average American. So that we have, quote, two subsets of the elite who are not represented of the broader society that are completely driving sort of extreme conversation on social media.

Finally, he says, social media in this new form, deputize everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes, enhanced virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment

for small or imagined defenses, with real-world consequences including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed in the suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics, unrestrained by due process, we don't get justice and inclusion. We get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth. So we get that happening as well. That is, again, another point I will just say, I hear this a lot in conversations about

social media, content, content moderations. This came up, I think, in the context of last week's discussion of Elon Musk and Twitter where people say, no, I think it's good. Look, it's good that there's blowback. You know, if you're worried about saying something, that means you should be worried about saying it. And you often hear the phrase, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. You can say what you want, but you have to be ready for the consequences.

And I think what height is pointing out here is that on its own is a vacuous statement. you look at any example in history where there is a clearly like let's say authoritarian regime dispensing arbitrary dictatorial justice was like look at Stalin throwing people into the gulag if you were to go there and see what was going on he was not just saying i am an i have arbitrary power and i'm putting you in the gulag because i don't like you and what are you going to do about it no there'd be a trial and and he would say look yeah that you You would say the similar sort of thing. What you say, things have consequences. You were treasonous to the country. This treason is going to unsettle the communist utopia. Like, you know, your actions have consequences and you're doing something dangerous. You need to go to the gulag.

I mean, that's true of any time, anywhere. So what you have to do, of course, is with some humanity and common sense, just look at the particular context and say, is this largely actually just or is a disproportionate. So if you're in Stalin's Russia, you would say this is very disproportionate. He's sending people to Gulag clearly because he just doesn't like them or they're not on his team or he's trying to make sure that he can preserve power. And obviously things aren't that bad now, but I think a lot of neutral observers looking at the swiftness and virality of pylons, both on the left and right, would say this can't possibly be proportional and just. It just doesn't seem that way. Our common sense is saying that's not true.

So I don't buy the argument of, hey, you can say what you want, consequences, but you can't be free from consequences. consequences. That applies in every context. What matters is are the consequences we've seen, as height would say, proportional, merciful, and truthful. And, you know, often they're not. And it's because, as height points out, the viral dynamics of these platforms have pushed out most of the middle, pushed out most normal people. We have these two extremes on either side, completely disproportionate of the population that not only control the conversation, but are doing so in an incredibly aggressive way because they're trying to play the dynamics of great viral reward

while avoiding or participating in great viral punishment. And so it really is a wild west of a small number of disproportionate vigilantes running around. And he thinks that's very destabilizing. And I think he's probably true. All right. So what do we do about it? Well, I don't have a definitive answer,

but there's a couple points I want to make. first of all, I think I am somewhat alone in my argument that I do not think Twitter is as fundamental as everyone else does. Height makes this point. Elon Musk has recently made this point. They're all saying this is the town square. It's critical to democracy. That's why we really have to care about it.

I don't think it's critical to democracy. I don't think it's the town square. I think if height is right that what Twitter is is 11% of the population segregated at the extremes, playing this weird viral vigilante game of viral reward and viral punishment, maybe being observed by a larger group of people who find the emotions of this kind of entertaining. This is not the public town square. This is the Coliseum. This is the gladiator to the fights to the death.

That people in Rome will wander over to watch because it's bloody and interesting and is better than doing something else. It's kind of exciting. but it's not at the core of democracy, and how do we know that? Because what would happen if, for whatever reason, let's say Elon succeeds and his latest thing is he wants to buy Twitter, he made an offer. Let's say he just shuts it down.

Nothing bad would happen. 85% of the country or 90% of the country wouldn't even notice because most people don't use Twitter. You don't need Twitter to report the news. You don't need Twitter to be a politician. You don't need Twitter to be entertained. Like nothing bad would happen. people would barely notice.

It would have less of an impact than, you know, supply chain disruption for toilet paper. How could that be critical to the town square? It's a coliseum. It's not the Roman Senate. That is my argument. So once we recognize that, then I would argue, we need to downgrade the importance of Twitter.

It's weird. It's this weird 240 characters or whatever it is now with these weird viral dynamics and these little boxes with these threads and it's this weird bloody gladiator game and we say I'm leaving the Coliseum and here's what I think we need instead. A, we replace the distraction that Twitter gives, whoever it gives distraction to with better distraction. There's better things to do if you're bored. Yeah, it's exciting but, you know, listen to a podcast, read a book, have a better hobby.

There's all sorts of things you can do that are interesting and entertaining more so than these weird short character threads of extreme people fighting these. each other. Two, I think social media itself needs to fragment much more and get back more towards that 2000 to 2009 period where it is about connecting to people that you find interesting and know expressing yourself. Social media should be more niche. It should be more about like people felt MySpace was in the early days or Facebook was in the early days. Here is a group of amateur bicyclists and we connect with each other and we share photos of our robots. We share photos of our and encourage each other, and we have our own norms and our own way of talking.

And it's great. And I'm glad it exists because there's not enough amateur cyclists who live near me to actually like meet that many people. And that's what social media should be. It should not try to be a virtual town square. There should not be a service that everyone feels like they have to use. That doesn't work. Finally, see, we need better ways for those who actually do have important, useful

or thought-provoking information to share to use the internet to share that. There is no reason why the best and brightest, the most interesting, the smartest, the most engaging thinkers and writers out there should be constrained to a small number of characters, retweets and linking and adding, and all of these weird arbitrarily rules

that serve to do nothing but virality. And virality is not useful for giving you the ability to share and express yourself in the, hear what other people are saying, is really not that useful for it. The internet existed before the retweet, social media and internet existed before the like button. So I think we need perhaps an earlier Web 2.0 type approach, podcast, blogs, individual websites where you can express yourself at length and in detail. And yes, it's harder to find attention when you're

kind of on your own. But that, I think, is a feature. That means you're going to gather a more focused crowd, the best will rise to the top. You know, yeah, most podcasts don't get listened to, but ones that are interesting, get big audiences. It's harder, but it's longer form. It's more nuanced and it doesn't have viral dynamics. It doesn't create these weird pushes to the extremes. I wrote an article about this for Wired magazine early in the pandemic where I said the best

thing we could do from a public health perspective for the, during the pandemic, would probably be shut down Twitter. It's just going to make people crazy. It's going to push people in weird directions. it's not going to help. It's not going to help our psychological or physical health or in a pandemic. And my argument in that wired piece was we should go back to blogs for medical experts. And they should be hosted on institutional website. So we trust it. Oh, this doctor works for this medical network.

The blog is posted on that network. Like we're already validating. Like this is where this person comes from. Here's why I should trust them. And he's not doing tweet threads of screenshoted charts. He can write a real article. And yeah, if you wanted to use social media to say, I publish a new article, you can find it here, fine. But that was the appropriate form because it allows us to do curation of who we should be listening to, to get more information, to have context, to have nuance.

Twitter was a terrible medium for that type of discussion. So I think we need to go back or forward, we could even say to a way of communicating, expressing ourselves that doesn't constrain us to these weird, narrow platforms that are built around virality and active user minutes, not around the most effective ways. to convey information. All right. So that's my thoughts on this general point. I think John Haidt is right and perceptive. I think he clarified better. I've made this argument.

He clarifies it a little bit better. That as you shifted from, the way I usually put it is as you shifted from the wall to the news feed. As you shifted from looking at friends posts to liking and retweeting, you got these weird viral dynamics that transformed the social media landscape into this weird group of extremes and vigilantes that's had a huge negative effect. And again, most people don't use Twitter, but reporters use it, politicians use it, corporate executives look at it, and it has so therefore a huge outsized effect. And to me, again, it's not the town square, it's not the Roman Senate, is the Coliseum.

And we're letting the bloody combat in the Coliseum, as entertaining as it is to look at in the moment, we're letting that actually dictate the way the rest of us live their lives, how news is covered, how politicians act as legislatures, how companies set policy or change, change their directives or initiatives, or even decide who to hire or fire. And this is crazy. The Coliseum should not have a major role. There is nothing fundamental about this technology. We can do better with the internet.

And I hope we actually do. So that's my thought on John Hight's article on Twitter. So good job John Hight. And that would be what I add to it. I mean, the one exception where we do need Twitter, I think, is baseball trade rumors, because I need that information fast. But hey, look, that's an example, though. Yeah, Twitter is good for getting baseball trade rumor information fast.

But there's a website, MLBtrade Rumors.com, that works just as well. And it's focused on just that. And I'll tell you something. And then I'll let this go. but I'll tell you something. That is where I went to see what was going on and the highly compressed free agency that happened in March after the collective bargaining agreement was made,

finalized for MLB. Because specifically, I did not want to go to Twitter to see what the baseball reporters were saying because Twitter was going to push in my face, terrible, terrifying news about Ukraine and nuclear war and about COVID. And I was like, I don't want to go to the Coliseum to find out about my team.

And so I went to a special purpose website. Got the news I wanted. without the stress. So case and point, that's the future we need. All right, well, why we do a couple more questions here? 43 minutes. Jesse, I'm going to, as I always say, I'm going to try to bring this episode in for a landing fast.

Yeah, right, I'll believe it when I see it. Well, I think without actual Jesse here, I'm going to feel more, more svelte. Move a little bit quicker. I've said that literally every episode. So we got a question here from, Jeremy says, how do I apply your ideas to skilled labor? Can you discuss how you would implement practices of the deep work methodology

and to work in the trades and the skilled labor sector? I'm a home builder, general contractor, and find it difficult to attain a deep work practice because everything I do is dealing with uncontrolled variables. Client needs, other trades, employee management, scheduling, that make it hard to stay focused on the actual building with my hands. Well, Jeremy, it's a good question. I'd be careful about the use of the word deep work there.

I mean, again, deep work is a specific type of activity, but I get what you're going at. Like what you're going at here, I think, is you feel like you're in a hyperactive hive mind type setup. You're constantly reacting to all sorts of different uncontrolled, unpredictable variables, and it gets in the way of actually doing the core work, whether we want to call that deep or not, of doing to skilled labor. I think this is a common mistake that a lot of people make. They think that the type of anti-hyperactive hive buying organizational systems and

philosophies I talk about is for knowledge work only for people on Zoom meetings do an email all day. That's not true. Actually, in the trades, these ideas could be even more important and applicable. The key is in your situation, if you do skilled labor, is systems, systems, systems. You have to get out of a state in which you are generally available to anyone who needs you whenever they need you. Yes, in the moment that is easy. Systems are a pain and people don't like them in the moment. But if you just make yourself available to anyone who needs you whenever they need you, it will be incredibly frustrating. You're not going to get a lot done.

you're going to be miserable. So in the trades, you need someone managing the phone, right? Someone who can do that for you. You probably need an office manager to help deal with scheduling and employing logistics and tax filings. You don't want to be doing all that stuff on your own. Yes, you're going to have to spend more money to do this, but it's going to allow your business to grow.

Let me tell you what's going to grow businesses and the skill trade. From what I've heard, nothing grows a business in the skill trades more than you reliably, you're reliable. I can call and office manager answers. The person always gets back to them in a timely fashion. If something is scheduled, it happens. Especially when you're dealing with annoying knowledge worker types like us, which are kind of used to like calendars and Zoom meetings.

When things happen, it's supposed to happen. If you can play in that idiom, if you can basically be, I know how to reach this person, I know how it works, he shows up, he's reliable, you'll have all the customers in the world. Even if like, oh, I don't have time to do this person. Don't ghost them. You have a system. Like, hey, here's what, yeah, we don't have room.

Here's the waiting list. Here's what's going on. Anyways, so, yes, the stuff I'm going to talk about might require some more employees. Might cost more money, but you're going to make more money in the end. So your office manager should then be equipped with good systems for payroll, invoicing, et cetera. Automate all that, have set systems for that. Do not do that ad hoc.

You should not be on the fly. Send the emails or answering questions. You need pre-planned. check-ins and planning sessions with all of the relevant people in your work. You check in with the people back at the home office three times during the day. That's when they tell you who called, what's going on. You can confer, answer quick questions, et cetera, not just them calling you whenever they need you.

When you're on a job site, you have set check-in times with the clients. You give them a full update and they can ask or answer their questions. Maybe you have an end-of-the-day rule. You know, yeah, send me a message. or call the person at the home office, and I have an hour at the end of every day where I call people back. We'll see what's going on. Again, people want clarity, not just accessibility.

Have specific times and days. You do things like estimates or site visits. You really want to structure and automate all this. You can use text and email. I learned just from a builder, actually. I talked about this in my book, A World Without Email, a commercial real estate builder. make texts and email be only for questions that can be answered with no back and forth. Questions you can answer with one sentence with no back and forth.

Yeah, that's more efficient to have that just be sent on email. So when you get time to look through email, you can answer those. Anything that requires back and forth, get it out of email, wait until the pre-plan check-in time. So, look, I don't want to be too specific here, Jeremy, because I don't know your exact business, but you should get the sense of what I'm going for. What I'm going for here is you structure your interactions, you have help, You have systems so that you know what you're supposed to be doing at any one time. You're not at any one time beholden to a huge number of unpredictable requests for your time and attention.

It's a little bit more structure. You're going to have to hire some more people. But honestly, it's going to make you better at what you do. People are going to like working with you better. You're going to do better work. You'll triple your size of your business. So it is worth it. All right.

We have a question here from Lira. Lira says, how do you deal with unexpected overload and burnout that you can't really ease? I'm a 26-year-old Spanish ESL teacher and nutrition student from Spain. I've been working at an academy teaching English part-time for the last year and a half. I'm also finishing my degree project for university from home and working out a bookstore owned by family members. Due to the owner having an unexpected illness, my hours at the store have doubled and have to work for another three months, blah, blah, blah. Now I get up very early to work on my project before working at the store all morning. I'm feeling burnt out.

I'm not well rested and I'm feeling stressed most of the time. I time block and keep to-do list that I assign specific days and times, plan my day so I can fit everything and have started quarterly planning since September, which does help keep my eye on my goals and figure out the next steps. But this does not help with burnout. Could it be I'm simply adjusting to the increased workload or what would you recommend? Well, Leera, first of all, I understand the state you're in. And I get there often myself where I have a lot of things on my plate because I'm very organized. I can make it fit. So it's not like things are being left behind or I'm scrambling to staying up all night long to try to get deadlines on.

It's not that type of stress of I don't have enough time to get things done. But it's exhausting. Every minute is scheduled right up to a shutdown. You feel like there's no gaps in that time block schedule. Your full intensity all day long. I find that exhausting. And that's exactly a situation. you're in. And you're exhausting, A, because of just constant labor, that's just physically draining day after

day after day to do that. It's just draining. It also, at least this is my theory, short circuits the planning centers of our brain, which aren't used to having so many things on our plate. Yes, with artificial help and tools like multi-scale planning, we can make it work, but our brain doesn't really know about that. And so it can't wrap its mind about all the different stuff on your plate. And so it's freaked out about it. How are we going to get this all done? It's used to a slower pace of execution. You're straight up exhausted and you have the negative effect of this planning center short circuiting.

That's why you feel burnout. So here's the cure. Do fewer things. Take more breaks. That means one of these things going on in your life, you're going to have to pause or stop. Now, I think you know that this is the answer. And the reason why I think you know this is the answer is that in the full version of of your question. I condensed this, but in the full version of your question, you were very

careful around each of the things you introduced that was drawing from your time to put these disclaimers that explained why there wasn't more blood to squeeze from that turn-up. There wasn't, you didn't have options to make it easier. You didn't have options to make it more flexible, to spread it out more like, this is its demands, I can't change it. You said that for each of the things. So you were you were preemptively trying to sidestep an answer that was like with a little bit more organization, with a little bit more savvy in how you lay things out, maybe things will feel better. Because I think you knew the answer was that's not going to solve it. There's too much raw stuff on my plate and it's exhausting me. And you were looking for

permission for me to take things off your plate. And I'm giving you that permission right now. We have a hard time with this taking things off our plate. especially those of us like you, Leera, who are driven and ambitious and interesting and doing interesting stuff. All these things you're doing are either interesting or admirable. You're helping your family. You're getting a degree. You're working on a big project.

And we feel bad about taking stuff away. But let me tell you, when you zoom out and look at these pictures, in the big scale, it's not a big deal. You're going through a period of, you said, three more months where you have to take extra shifts in a bookstore to help your family. Okay, that's nice. So maybe you need to delay the nutrition degree by a semester or not do your project yet. And say, look, we have this family thing going on. I have to help out. In the big picture, it's not going to matter.

You're going to get your degree. You're going to finish your project. You help your family. You spread this out by another six months. It's not a big deal. But in the moment, it feels like failure because stepping back, adding things makes us feel good. Hey, look how admirable and ambitious I am. I'm doing all these interesting things.

stepping back from things makes us feel bad or like something bad is happening or like there is a failure. And we amplify in our mind how much other people are going to care when we do that reality check. They don't. They're thinking about themselves. They're barely going to notice. I used to encounter this in a dramatic way when I was a grad student at MIT.

And I was writing student books and I was advising informally advising undergraduates to help them apply my advice to their lives. And the tradeoff was I would then write about them on my blog. anonymously or shoot anonymously. But I would like, let me help you get your life in order as a student and then let me write about it. I had a series on my blog called College Chronicles back then where I'd write about it. And I remember I would come across students. And there was one in particular.

I remember this one student. And I called her Lena. It's not a real name, but I called her Lena. She's at MIT and she was an undergraduate. And she had all this stuff on her plate because she was so ambitious, her family and her school back home were so proud she got to MIT. and she didn't want to let them down, so she had three majors and all these clubs. And she was the person that everyone was always impressed by. And the only lever she knew how to pull the increase impressiveness was quantity,

quantity of activities. But she was having trouble. And so I worked with her. I said, let's look at all of your obligations and figure out how much time they need each week. And let's try to figure out a schedule, a student autopilot schedule. We can make time for each of these things. So it's automatic. Tuesday at this time, I work on my problem set.

Wednesday after dinner, I'm at this club meeting. We did this exercise and we ran out of time. Even if she worked every hour of the day from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., she still couldn't get all the work done, even in a normal week where there wasn't like extra exams or projects do. They said, this is black and white, Lena. You have to quit things. You have to stop doing three majors.

You can't do all these clubs. You literally don't have time. Black and white. She couldn't do it. She couldn't do it. Because to quit something or walk away from something would be her stepping away from accomplishment, stepping away from ambition, it would be letting people down. And I've told this story before, but what happened to Lena was she burnt out and had to take a

leave of absence, a medical leave of absence for mental health issues. Fryer break. So I understand the difficulty here. But this is me telling you and giving you the permission I think that you want from me. Do less. Spread it out. Give yourself a break. Give yourself breathing room.

you're young. None of this is incredibly time sensitive. When you look back 10 years from now, you're not even going to know the difference between getting all this done in the next three months and spending eight months instead. But in the moment, it's going to be night and day. There's going to be the difference between

physical breakdown and exhaustion and all of the things that can lead to, depression, deep procrastination, health issues. It can be the difference between that and like actually having some autonomy, control, gratitude, and depth in life. So that's what I'm going to say, Learra. Do less, I give you permission.

Quit the way. It's not retreating from your ambition. It's tackling it in a way that's going to be sustainable in the long term. I got another question. I got one last question I want to get to. First, so let me just talk about another sponsor that makes this show possible. And that is Ladder. you know, life is

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Speaking of life insurance, Scarecrow Jesse, as you know, we do have a $20 million life insurance policy on your head. on an unrelated note, I think it's important that you go do some reporting for me off the coast of South Africa in the water there, which is known for the Great Whites. I need you to do some reporting for me from that water covered in blood. I can explain later why I want you to surround yourself with, surround yourself with chum, go into those waters. and it's just a really important reporting thing I need to do. This has nothing to do with the $20 million life insurance.

This is key to the show that you're swimming in chum in shark-infested South African waters. All right. Speaking of, let me put this another way, completely changing subjects. I want to talk also about our sponsor, Headspace. Look, we all say fine when we don't mean it.

But fine isn't really an emotion, right? I mean, how many times you told yourself you're fine when all you've really felt is anger or sadness or nerves? This is where Headspace enters the picture. It's a scientifically proven to help you manage your feelings and your mental health. And it's an app that gives you guided meditations and make you feel better. In fact, a recent study proved in just two weeks headspace can reduce your stress by 14%. It can help you relieve stress, anxiety, sleep better, even improve your focus. This is important to do you question.

listeners, they have guided meditations to help put you into a focused mood to get better deep work done. I have tried those meditations. I like the focus meditations. They are really a good way if you're coming out of a lot of nonsense. Let's say you're talking to a scarecrow about shark diving. And now you need to actually think deep and produce something good. Five-minute guided focus meditation work wonders, great deep work ritual. I've also used on occasions. I've also used on occasions. the anxiety, anti-anxiety guided meditations where if it's in a peak of anxiety, like whatever, things are going on, you get those feelings. The ones I've done have focused on breathing, it slows you down, it separates you from the feelings themselves.

It's quite powerful. So Headspace is a useful app to have in your mental health arsenal. So however you're feeling, try Headspace at headspace.com slash questions and get one month free your entire mindfulness library. This is the best Headspace offer available. So we go to headspace.com slash questions today. That's headspace.com slash questions. All right.

Speaking of questions, I got one more I want to get to. Alex asks, should I focus on process or results-oriented goals? There are two kinds of goals, input-based goals, such as hours spent reading or hours working on a project and output-based goals, such as number of books read per month or certain project milestones, which is better? Neither is better, Alex. They both serve purposes, but at different, relevant time scales.

So in deep work, I borrow some terminology from the 4DX methodology, which is the lead versus lag indicator. So what you called process focus, like how many hours you spent reading, they call that a lead indicator, something you can directly track. And what you called results focused, like how many books I read or project milestones, they would call lag indicators. It's what you ultimately want to accomplish. And what they talked about in that book, which I think is a good idea even beyond their context, is lead indicators are what, on the short time scale you should focus on and track. If you do daily metric planning,

you should be tracking your lead indicators. Those lead indicators should then be pushing you towards accomplishing the lag indicators to bigger goals. So at the time scale of quarters or months, you might have lag indicator goals. I want to to get through this series of books. I want to double my client count. And you know that's important. You got to track it. Like if you don't know where you're aiming, you're not going to get anywhere. You got to identify these things you want to do and why they're important and they should be there in your quarterly plan. But what do you do on Monday? What do you do on Tuesday at 10 a.m.? That's where the lead indicators come into play. I'm reading 20 pages. I'm making three client calls. So both of these things have to

be in your arsenal. They just exist at different scales. At the quarterly plan scale, you, have your results oriented lag indicators. At the daily weekly scale, you have your lead indicators, which are the actual actions you're doing and tracking at a fine-grained way that's going to help you accumulate the effort and work required to get to those bigger goals. All right. Well, speaking of goals, I think we went a little over an hour. No thanks to you, Scarecrow, Jesse, which didn't have much to add.

Hey, man, don't blame me. I do blame you. but for all of you who watch this on YouTube, my apologies for the nonsense of the Jesse Scarecrow. For all of you who are listening, again, congratulations. You skip that nonsense. I'll be back on Thursday with another episode of the Deep Questions podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.