Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 196: Shutting Down Anxiety

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Video from today’s episode:   youtube.com/calnewportmediaCal reacts to his inbox [7:48]QUESTIONS:- How do I manage a two-part workday?  [26:49]- How do I save my “shut down” ritual? [34:14]- LISTENER CALL: Should I work on challenging projects or take the easy path? [37:58]Cal reacts to the news: A Catholic Response to Workism [48:48]- How do I select projects? [1:10:51]- How do I tame WhatsApp with my friends and family? [1:20:51]Thanks to our Sponsors:Blinkist.com/DeepZocdoc.com/DeepLadder.com/DeepAthleticGreens.com/DeepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 196. I'm here in my Deep Work H.Q. joined by my producer Jesse on a beautiful day. Jesse, when it's beautiful outside, I always say we need to get inside quickly into a windowless small room surrounded by black curtains. So mission accomplished us. We are getting no advantage. I mean, for you, you're a golfer.

You probably see a day like today and think. What a waste that I'm not out there with a glove in my hand. I agree. I am golfing tomorrow, though, so I'll be okay. Yeah, it works. It's a hard life we live here. We were a little late getting started on our schedule because, as Jesse knows, I was stuck on a proof.

So I was working on a theoretical computer science paper. I was getting some momentum in a proof, and it was tricky. And I couldn't quite make it work, but I figured I could get around the obstacles a little bit more concentration. That is a circumstance in which, it is very difficult for me to stop. It's a very similar circumstance to be on a role when you're writing a section of like a book chapter or an article.

It's very difficult to stop mid writing. But anyways, I was thinking about that, given what we talk about on this show, because it underscored the degree to which concentrated mental work. So deep work efforts on really hard cognitive problems is something we don't really understand. I mean, it's very intense. once you get all of that context loaded into your brain, it can be very hard to stop.

I mean, I couldn't help but think as we were winding down to record this episode. The ideal setup for working on something like a math proof or working on a book would literally be just to do that. You can I do that all day long and then you do nothing else. That would probably be the ideal setup if we just want to say what's the best way to get value out of a human brain. And that, of course, is so far, so far from what we actually do in almost any knowledge, work jobs. So to me, this was just a parable about how little we understand when it comes to extracting

value from the human brain. And because of that, how bad we are at setting up our companies or organizations to actually accomplish that goal. Honestly, one thing at a time, probably is the right way to do this. I will say, though, progress talking about getting more focus into organizations on the show. And I don't remember what this was, Jesse. Maybe it was a a couple of weeks ago, I got a question from someone about how I would redesign university life. And I had all these ideas, some big, some small. And one of the ideas I had was all of the outgoing communication, the broadcasts, like everything that any organization in the university is sending that a professor in the university needs to read, all of that should be consolidated into some sort

of weekly broadcast divided by categories, maybe pulling out at the top stuff in which action is required versus purely informational, have some sort of hyperlinked index or table of content so you can quickly jump down to the parts of the message you like. And you get this as a professor once a week as opposed to getting 30 or 40 individual messages, all coming from different stakeholders at the institution, all coming at different times. Well, I got a note from a listener, shout out to Rebecca who said her university does this. So it does exist. So some people are doing this.

This makes me happy. I can see the flaw. I can see the flaw in the plan. And I really started thinking about this more recently because my older two sons' school does this as well. They consolidate all of their communication to one weekly email. And it's a lot less communication you probably get at a university. and people miss things all the time.

So it's the problem. So they have this one email. And, you know, on page 17 out of 40 is where it says, by the way, on Wednesday, your kids need to wear blue. Or on Thursday, there's this thing you have to sign or something like this. So things get missed all the time because it's such a long message. But that's a problem that can be solved with a good table of contents, pulling out the stuff that requires action to the top.

Anyways, I was heartened to see that there is some nice innovation happening out there when it comes to protecting our ability to concentrate. Now, we do have a good show for today. We have some questions that have been sent in. We have some calls to go through. Later on, stay tuned for this. Jesse and I are going to try to introduce a new technology. Later on in the show, we're going to do a Cal reacts to the news segment

where I'm actually going to be able to, for those watching this on YouTube, to bring up the article in question on screen and annotate and highlight it. So for those who are watching at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, you'll actually get to see me interacting with the article. Now, of course, we have a bad track record with introducing new technologies. We tend to get some gremlin's in the systems. I don't want you to be alarmed. I'm just saying there's a 50% chance that before that segment is over,

I will be on fire. Now, again, that just comes down to it. takes Jesse and I a little time to get new tech up and running. So stay tuned for that. So all of that is coming up. I want to kick off. I'm going to kick off today's episode with a new segment in which I look at messages that arrive in my, I was going to say world famous. What I mean is famous among the small group of people who are longtime fans of mine inbox, my interesting at calnewport.com inbox. But before I do even that, I want to briefly mention my longtime friend, Eric Barker has a new book out called Plays Well with Others,

The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships is Mostly Wrong. I've known Eric for a long time. He runs the very well-subscribed Barking Up the Wrong Tree Email newsletter where he does these exhaustive articles where he'll take a topic, really understand the scientific literature on it and present to you the big insights from what people know from the literature on that topic. It's a great newsletter. He has a podcast where he goes through these ideas. I've been on that podcast over the years many times. He had a really great book out a few years ago called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. This is his next book. It focuses specifically on what we can learn from the

scientific literature about how to make relationships work. Eric's a great writer. That book just came out the week before you hear this, it just came out. So plays well with others. Eric Barker, I suggest you check it out. Dan Pink said the following about it. Humorous and profound. Plays well with others. Will revitalize your life.

One little bit of insider tidbit about Eric. I think the reason why his books and newsletter reads so well, and not a lot of people know this, he was a screenwriter before he switched over to nonfiction writing. He spent many years as a screenwriter. so I think that construction follows through into his writing. All right. So that is a unsolicited plug.

Eric is not paying me for this. He didn't save my life. I don't owe him $10,000 from a gambling bet gone awry. I just like Eric and I want others to read his book. All right. So let's get into our first segment here. I'm going to call this Cal reads his interesting inbox. So for those who don't know, I have long maintained and,

email address called Interesting at Calnewport.com. It's where I say you should send me any interesting article or link or book. Anything you think I might be interested in, send it to interesting at calnewport.com. I introduced that address many years ago. Earlier in the history of my blog and email newsletter, when I got to a point in my writing career where I could no longer individually answer every email that people sent me. I used to answer every email. They were mainly from students back then.

I felt like it was an important part of my giving back or ability to mentor. Eventually, the number of messages I got overwhelmed me. It was taking hours and hours. And so I had to, with sadness, move past my habit of I will respond to every email I responded, received. Part of that was introducing this interesting address. So I didn't want to cut off all of the cooler interesting stuff people would send me. So I said, here is an address interesting at Calnewport.com. it's really clear if you go and see that link on my website that I'm probably not going to be able to respond to you, but I will read what you send me or I will look at what you what you send me.

So it's a way I can still get interesting articles and tips from my readers. I've had that now in place for years and years and it's one of my favorite traditions. So I grabbed the few messages that people sent me in that inbox and I figured let's go through them now. So the first thing I want to talk about was an interview conducted with Jerry Seinfeld by the Harvard Business Review. This is not new. This is from 2017. This is why I like about my interesting inboxes. People find cool stuff to send to me.

So hat tip to Andy for sending me this interview. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I just want to read one exchange that I thought was particularly interesting. So the interviewer says, You and Larry David wrote Seinfeld together without a traditional writer's room, and burnout was one reason you stopped. Was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey or someone have helped you find a better model? Jerry then responded, who's McKinsey?

To which the interviewer responded. It's a consulting firm. Jerry then said, are they funny? The interviewer said, no. So Jerry responded by saying, then I don't need them. If you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show is successful because I micromanaged it.

Every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That's my way of life. All right. So I like that exchange. I've heard that, by the way, about other successful shows. So this was true, for example, of 30 Rock. Tina Faye and her head writer basically hand wrote together every beat of that show. And the way she describes it was it's just really hard work.

They had an incredible density of jokes. If you watch a 30 rock episode, you don't go more than 30 seconds without a joke. Everything is a joke. That's a lot of writing. Joke writing is hard. Maybe it's not too hard to come up with a premise, but to get the timing right is difficult. This is hard work. And they just did the work.

That's what made that show successful. I like this general point that Jerry is making, which is valuable. work is hard. There is a lot of friction. It's not very convenient. It's not very efficient. That is an interesting point because it is running at odds to the notion of efficiency, to the notion of optimization. These are two different things going on. Jerry and Larry were not trying to optimize. They said the reason why the show is funny is because the two of us just sit in a room and ignore network notes and just try to go until it's funny. There's nothing optimal about it. But it is in that friction

that the heat is created, that heat in this case was a world change in show. And so we have this interesting tension caught by that article. Producing things a great value, who cares about efficiency? Use an old notebook. Come back to things again and again. Dedicate half

of your day every day to doing nothing but trying to polish this further. Copy your notes from one thing to another. Go to annoying, difficult locations that are awe-inspiring to do your thinking. Be hard to reach. Do not have really efficient ways of people getting to contact you and moving information back and forth. Because you know what? None of that matters when it comes to producing

value. So I think that's important. Not that you don't want to be efficient where efficiency is called for, but it tells us let's not put efficiency or optimization at the top of the altar, especially when it comes to adding value to information, the core grist of the knowledge work mill. these are two separate magisteria producing valuable things and getting things done efficiently. They're not the same. And we have to respect both of them.

So I think that's a nice quote from Seinfeld. I also like the idea that he said, who's McKinsey? Is he funny? I think Seinfeld run by the McKinsey consulting company would be a much, much different show. All right. So I got another thing here.

Another article came from my interesting inbox. This one comes from Joshua Hat, tip to Joshua. This is from the journal Nature. And this is actually a news and views column. So if you don't know nature, this is actually a, like an article that is talking about a research article.

So it's not the original research article, but it's some authors talking about some important new research. Here's the headline. Virtual collaboration hinders a key component of creativity. So this was looking at Zoom in particular. There's two researchers here, Brooks and LeVos,

and they did a pretty thorough study. This was over five different countries. They were using technology like eye trackers and movement trackers. It was a pretty complicated study. And they were looking at, and I'm reading from the article here, two measures of creativity,

ideation performance and idea selection quality. And they were comparing both those metrics when they were looking at teams that were in person and teams that were connecting over video conference. So, Jesse, I'll quiz you. Before I tell you the results, we have two things here. Idea generation and the identification of good ideas once they come up. How do you think these compared between in person and Zoom?

So you have two activities. Either they're the same between the two or one is better in one context or the other. Idea generation, idea selection. What do you think was affected by Zoom? Generation by Zoom. All right. So you say generation, yes.

That's exactly right. In person meetings result in better ideation performance. However, there is no difference between the collaborative approaches in terms of the quality of the ideas selected. So that's interesting. I'm not surprised. I looked into not this exact question, but I did some research for both digital minimalism

and a world without email about communication. One of the key insights of that research is that there is a lot involved in communication that's not just linguistic. So there's body language, the ways that people move their bodies in space, there's facial expressions and timing. Some of this comes through video conferencing,

but not all of it. And so if you're trying to work together to feed off of each other to come up with ideas, I'm not surprised that when you take or reduce some of these streams of information, that the outcome is not as good. This turns out to be one of the hypotheses these authors found. I'm quoting from the article here. The authors think that the use of video screens limits the amount of information that can be shared between teammates during virtual communication.

The only other thing that came to mind is also people don't pay nearly as close attention when they're in a video conferencing setup. I have email open. I have Slack open. I'm my phone open. I'm in and out in terms of my attention window. You're just going to get less value out of it. So definitely something to keep in mind

when we're thinking about the design of the future office. There's differences. There's a lot of differences. Keep those in mind. All right. So I have one other item to summarize here. This came to me from Josh. different than the Joshua who sent the last article.

He is pointing me towards a discussion paper from the London School of Economics that looked at 102 different firms communication data, so how many emails and how many meetings were going on in these firms. Here was the abstract. This paper uses novel firm-level measures derive from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms.

The study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover leads to an initial decrease in intra-firm communication, followed by a significant increase approximately five months after the CEO change. The increase is driven primarily by manager-to-employee communication. Greater increases in communication after CEO change are associated with greater increases. in firm market returns. So Josh is asking, is this repudiating a world without email? It's finding that after a CEO changed, if there was more communication happening, more email,

that company was more likely to do better in the marketplace in the immediately following circumstance. So I think that is a cool study. Here's what I would argue, however, just simply looking at email volume, in this context is probably not the right measure of productivity. The AB test here that matters is hyperactive hive mind versus non-hyperactive hive mind. If you are in a hyperactive hive mind oriented organization, so most things are worked out with ad hoc back and forth messaging, and you don't change that. All you change is more messaging. Well, there's going to be more things that probably get done. So what's probably happening in this scenario, if I had

to guess is that increased email communication, since nothing else changed about how they structured their communication, increased communication was just a second order side effect of more active management overhaul. So when you had a CEO change, it had more email communication than this company that had a CEO change. That's probably because in the first company, they're doing more stuff. It's a more active CEO. If you do more stuff, you're probably more likely in that post-change period to have more growth. There's a reason why you're making those changes. So what you're really measuring there is just how much activity are these companies doing after they have a CEO over change and the companies that do more after a change and do better, which I don't think is

super surprising. Now, you might argue, yes, but even if you don't move away from the hyperactive hive mind, more email versus less means more context shifts, more context shifts according to the world without email theory means people should be less productive. Again, I think that's not a huge factor here because in all cases, I think everyone was already probably saturated with contact shifting from email. In other words, I do not think there is a difference between the companies that did more communication than the companies with less. It's not the case that the company is doing less had people working long periods of time without disruption. And then the companies that did more was breaking up that time. I'm sure in all cases, people are checking

email once every five to six minutes. So once you're past the saturation point, you've done the damage for context shifting. Everyone is miserable. Everyone is in a state of reduced cognitive capacity. Piling more on top of that maybe makes people more miserable, but you're already in that hyperactive state. It's not going to make much of an impact on what you're able to do with your brain. So again, the real test you'd want to see, in my opinion, is a hyperactive hive mind firm

versus that same firm, or the only thing that changed is they replaced most of that ad hoc messaging with structured communication. that's where I think you're going to see a big advantage for those who embrace the ideas from my book. So at least that's the way I justify that. All right. So anyways, interesting at calnewport.com. I always appreciate tips, articles, interesting things, videos I should know about. I can't respond to most messages, but I try to read them all.

You can also bother Jesse at jessey at calnewport.com. He passes along things that are cool as well. All right, we have some good questions, but before we can get to the questions, we have to talk about some of the sponsors that makes the deep questions podcast possible. One of those sponsors you've heard me talk about many times before and for good reason, because I'm a fan, and that is Blinkist. Blinkist is a subscription service that gives you access to short 15-minute summaries of more than 5,000 non-fiction titles.

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They're like, Brady, like, we like, you're well known. You know, we like your insights. We're not sure, we're not sure if you're going to be able to be clear on air. And Brady's like, guys, I can do whatever it takes. Like, well, we've got a test for you. He's like, okay, whatever it takes. Like, all right, please read this phrase. Brady's like, all right, let's do it.

Zocdoc.com. Like, all right, good work, Brady. You got it. 25 million. 32 or 33. Is it really? All right. After he retires.

Yeah, whenever he does. You think he's a little bit of the needle in the arm there? Or is that all just his longevity? I heard someone arguing about this recently. Stereids, me? Or whatever. Performance enhancing. I don't, but I could see the argument.

He would say he stretches. Yeah. He stretches a lot. There's a lot of band workouts. Yeah. Well, whatever he does, yeah, a lot of band workouts. Whatever it is, it works. All right, well, NFL, if Tom doesn't work out, let this be my audition tape.

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It gets a $30 million and $50 million. Oh my. Okay. Let's do some questions. That's what the show is about. My first question here comes from Ilev, who asks, what do you think about doing two shutdowns a day

to add an evening session after the kids have gone to bed? To increase the time I have with my daughter, who's 1.5 years old, I would rather leave work early and have a work session in the evening after she has gone to bed. However, I find it difficult to stop thinking about work in the period where I am with my daughter between leaving work early and my afternoon work session. So in general, I think having two sessions time blocked out with a gap in between is perfectly

reasonable. There's a lot of people who do it. I think we had a call on the show once about this. It was someone who had essentially night courses. That's pretty common. So I have to get back into work mode because I have courses in the evening. And so you have a work block and you shut down, you do other stuff and you go back to a work block. Completely valid. A few thoughts about making that work. Shutdowns are critical. The shutdown after that first work block must be clean and it must be complete.

Because as you notice, the persistence of work thoughts are only going to amplify if your mind knows you're returning to them later that day. So if you're a little bit sloppy with your shutdown, your mind is going to really push hard to get back to ruminating or thinking about professional endeavors during your personal time. So you need a really hard, really hard shutdown. Close the open loops. Shut down. Anything is open. Check your inbox for issues.

And most importantly, look at what you're going to do during your second session. It's your mind trust that you have a good thing planned and you don't need to think about it in between. Be really careful about it. using your shutdown to do that cognitive behavioral training that we talk about with the shutdown routines, which is you do your first shutdown when you feel the urge to ruminate instead of getting into it with that particular work thought, say, look, I did my shutdown routine after the first session. I checked that check box in my time block planner or I said the unusual phrase like schedule shutdown complete. I would not have checked that box or said that phrase if I had not

actually convinced myself, we were fine to shut down and we can wait till the next session. Therefore, I do not have to get into this rumination. And at first, you're just going to be doing that again and again. You do it enough time. These grooves fill in. Your mind gives up on it and you're going to have a lot more presence and clarity, a lot less of these intrusive thoughts in between your two sessions. You really got to lean into your shutdown session if you're going to have these type of breaks in between work in the same day. I would also recommend if possibly, if possible in your first session earlier. What you're trying to plan for here is the total number of hours you're working during a day.

That should be a reasonable number of hours. So if like a seven or eight hour workday is what you're going for, don't work eight hours in your first session and then add a few more hours later. In that first session earlier, it sounds like that's what you're doing because you want that time with your kid, but make sure you're doing that. What you want is the total sum of your hours to be reasonable. don't be thrown by the fact that your first session is ending at a time when other people are still working. It's the total number of hours that matter. That's the advice I gave, by the way, the people who were doing night classes relevant to their work. I said, pull back when your work day ends to be earlier because that's cognitively demanding work.

And if you were working straight through to seven, I might say, look, that's too much work and you would agree. But if you work till five and then later in the evening do a two-hour class, it's kind of the same thing. So again, you want the total number of hours to add up to something reasonable, even if that means your first session ends kind of early. And then finally, be careful about how you divide your work between these two sessions. Now, this might depend on you and the type of work you're doing, the type of rhythms that work well for you, but maybe you're doing more hard stuff in the first session and you're doing less hard stuff in the second.

I can see the opposite working too, that you're really on top of calls and meetings and emails in the first session and the second session, you're working on just one thing, maybe one thing deep. That might actually be the best idea because you probably don't want to introduce too many context switches or open loops at the end of your day.

So maybe that's the way you want to do it. But be really thoughtful about how you're dividing work between those two sessions. For your particular situation, I leave, I mean, you elaborated that you're actually a PhD student. So the other thing I would throw out there for you to consider.

is just ending your work early and being done. It's not that hard of a job being a PhD student in most programs. It's not nearly as hard as other jobs if you're organized. Most PhD students are not. But if you are organized, it's like a superpower. So I don't want you to give up on this idea that maybe you could finish by three or whatever it is that you're aiming for and just be done and it's fine. don't add that second work session just because of an abstract guilt that I should be putting in enough hours.

If you can get your work done early and if you're organized, I really think you might be able to do it. Just have all that time for your daughter, for yourself. Keep that in mind. Your job might not be as hard as you fear. Can I ask one follow-up question for that? Yeah. Are you an advisor to any students, other PhD stuff? Do they follow your methods?

I don't know the degree to which they read. read my stuff. I mean, I think certainly they're aware. They're certainly they're aware of my books and they see me on things. Has anybody ever asked you about it? Well, so there's kind of a two-part answer to that. So, I mean, I don't always get into that with my PhD students unless they want to. Yeah. But I do at Georgetown have an open office hours policy where any Georgetown student can stop by, whether or not they're in my class or not to talk about anything they want to during the, during the, during the, semester, and a lot of people stop by to talk about that stuff. So I have a lot of students come through who have questions about organization. Career stuff is a big one. It's like so good they can't ignore you. That book is a big one for the college students because they're trying to figure out what do I want to do with my life. I'm trying to make these decisions. They're typically ambitious,

hard-charging students because they're at this good school and then they're trying to figure out what comes next. So I have a lot of students come through and we talk about a lot of these different, a lot of these different types of things, which is nice because when I was a grad student, used to answer emails from students all around the country. And then as we talked about, I lost the ability to do that because it was just too many emails. And so the way I'm able to maintain that connection to one-on-one direct advice, which is important to me, is my open office hour policy. That being said, let me mourn everyone. It's the summer now. I don't run office hours during the summer. I've had to tell three or four people, I think, in the last two days who have written me

students. Like, hey, can I come in to talk about X, Y, and Z? In the summer, I'm a bit of a ghost. All right, I pay my own salary in the summer. I write. I unwind. I don't come to campus that much. So you'll have to wait until fall, but I do run those open office hours. All right.

So I have another question here that goes along the same general track as our last one. It's about shutdowns from John. John says, how do I get back on track to doing a true shutdown ritual? I'm in a manager role. and my days seem to turn into chaos in the afternoons.

This is probably my fault for letting the urgent get in the way of the important. But the result is that I end up doing the important during time I've set aside for a shutdown ritual. After a couple of days, doing a true shutdown becomes seemingly impossible. How do I break the cycle of poor shutdowns and get back on track? Well, John, first of all, I don't think you have a shutdown ritual problem. you have a time blocking problem. You're clearly not putting aside enough time to actually deal with the quote unquote urgent. If I had to guess, you're way too optimistically building your time block schedules.

You are putting, I would assume, very little time in for dealing with things that come up, let's say through email or slack or drop-byes that are urgent that need responses. or you're putting the site time for your email inbox, but you're incredibly optimistically saying 30 minutes and it will be good where what you really need is 90 minutes or two hours. And so I'm going to suggest what you need to do here, to borrow a phrase from the earlier days of this podcast, is face the productivity dragon.

Actually time block the time you need to keep up with the things that are actually coming in and require your responses. Now, here's what you will find at first, I will guess, is that you are going to be a guest. Your time block schedules are going to be 80 to 90% Zoom meetings, in person meetings, and email inbox checks. But that is just reflecting reality. That is reflecting your reality.

If you actually time block all the time you need to put out fires so that when you get to your shutdown routine, you have time for it, you might realize that's all you're doing. So what's happening right now is you're just pretending like it doesn't take that much time. and then you spend the time anyways and then just blow past your schedule. Now, that doesn't mean you have to settle for living with that particular productivity dragging. This can be the wake-up call you need to say, how do I significantly reduce the number of

fires I'm putting out in an ad hoc manner? How do I significantly reduce the amount of time I spend in these meetings? Let that now be the fire that gets you moving. And this is where you can begin putting into place the types of ideas I talk about in my book, A World Without Email, to move more and more of the work that you're regularly involved in away from ad hoc unscheduled messages and towards more structured processes and systems. Now we have office hours. Now we have task boards for keeping track of who's working on who. Now we have structured status meetings to do rapid updates on lots of things. Now we're taking

things off of our plate because we're more directly seeing the impact of our current workload. all of these type of innovations that are going to make work more sustainable for you require a foundation of clarity. And that clarity comes from facing the dragon and saying, I want a time block schedule I stick to. If I need to spend five hours on email, I want to see five hours blocked out on my planner labeled email. I want when my supervisor or boss comes by to be able to say, this is what you have done to me. clarity face the dragon then you can figure out how you were going to slay it all right let's uh let's hear some voices here let's do a call jesse do we have a good call we can turn to yeah we sure do we got a call about elton he's turning 40 and he's wondering if he should cash in

on career capital or pursue like a hard grind he's been doing a job for like 15 years Hey, Cal, this is Elton. I'm a mechanical engineer. And turning 40, like other people that might be interested in this question. And division I'm working for is closing. But I spent the first 15 years in my career working in a test lab doing mechanical testing. And now I'm kind of looking at some different jobs that are available. I can keep working what I think are good, hard, challenging projects that. I can really focus on and really get into it. But for the same salary and everything, there's another job potential that would then be a much easier job and kind of cash in that career capital as you've talked about, you know, specific in the material testing realm that I have just built up so much experience. So at what point do you keep going after a good hard grind and hard challenges versus. is start to cash in on the career capital that you've built to then have additional time for other activities. I'd love to hear your answers.

Well, Elton, I think 40, turning 40 is a good natural checkpoint in one's life, especially in sort of the modern world of highly educated knowledge work. If you figure out how much time you're in schooling and how much time you're getting your feet. By a time you're 40, you've had enough time to get on your feet to figure out what you're doing to gain some capital and some self-awareness and then to step back and take a breather and say, okay, what's next? As I've mentioned on the podcast before, I think midlife crises get a bad rap. People think about buying convertibles and leather jackets, but I think we could have some better terminology here, some better marketing, like midlife check-in, mid-life course correction.

It's a great time. It's a great time to change things up. So I'm glad you're doing this thinking now. I'm also about to turn 40. Jesse, of course, turned 40 long time ago. Long time. We're talking like two months ago at this point, is it, six weeks ago. So he's probably too old at this point to be useful, but I'm 39. I have not yet turned 40. I'm like you, Elton. We're in our 30s. We still have our lives ahead of us so we can think about this. Here's what I'm going to suggest. Dust off your lifestyle-centric career planning hat and do that exercise pretty seriously again right now.

So as long-time listeners and readers of mine know, lifestyle-centric career planning is my theory that when you're trying to figure out what to do. do professionally. It is easy to get tripped up on very narrow concerns, such as this notion that you're wired for a particular job and is that job matching what you're wired for. So this is the whole passion hypothesis issue, the whole follow your passion issue, as you're focusing so exclusively on this mystical match between work and your inclinations, other people get caught up on individual factors of jobs. So income is an easy one because it's a number on a scoreboard. and so you can see that number tick up. So it's easy to get locked into that.

Like, well, how can I get this income number to keep going up? That becomes a game where you keep wanting that to go higher. Prestige is another one. I want more prestige, more prestige. How much do people respect this? How much more will I be respected if I do this? So it's easy to get locked into individual factors. Lifestyle-centric career planning says, take a beat, step back.

Your job is one thing that feeds into your overall life. what is your goal with all of this is to have a life that is meaningful, sustainable, and satisfying. So the right way to think about your career, at least according to this theory, is to fix a very clear picture of what you want your lifestyle to be like in the near to medium term future. So now that you're 40, you can go through this exercise. It's going to look very different than when you do this exercise at, let's say, 21. You have a lot more miles under that keel. you have a lot more career capital accrued.

You've also learned a lot more about yourself. Maybe you're married at this point. Maybe you have kids. Maybe you're more involved in certain community organizations that you had no connection to earlier. You have a lot more to work with. So go back and do this exercise. Five years for now, 10 years, for now, 15 years for now, what do I want my life to be like?

And you go through all of the details. Where am I living? What type of place am I living? What's my house like? Am I in the country? Am I in a town? Am I in the city? What's my time like?

What about my connection with people? how much of my life is connecting with people, or is it in work, or is it in production? Look for particular case studies of individuals that resonate. I read this profile of this writer or of this surfboard shaper or of this master of the universe, CEO type, or this nonprofit doctor, whatever it is. What's resonating? And you try to deconstruct those stories. What is it about this person's life I've read about that's hitting the right buttons for me? And you nail down this lifestyle.

You imagine yourself in all of the different details, what your day is like, what things look like, what it feels like, what it smells, like all of this. You get that so clear. And then you work backwards and say, great, how do I get to something like that? What are my different options for moving my life towards that lifestyle? And work will play a big role in that, but now it's very instrumental. Now it's very instrumental. So when you do this, for example, Elton, in your particular case, if when you do this exercise, you find a lifestyle you're picturing.

It does not have a huge, there's not a huge component to it where you're, whatever, selling a giant company or up in a boardroom making moves. Maybe what you envision is you live near the water and it's quiet and you're building a boat in a woodshed and maybe you have your kids there or something like this and they're out collecting fireflies or something like this, right? If you have a lifestyle that's really resonating that's like that, and you're like, okay, I need some amount of money. to do that. How much do I need? Let's get that number down. Let's definitely go to the job that's more flexible. It's remote and flexible and I can live on the Chesapeake Bay. And if I do it,

it's kind of nine to five or whatever, you figure it out and you say this can be very compatible with this job. Or you say what I need to do is really just keep pushing this skill because I can start doing that on a consulting basis and maybe work eight months a year and take four months off. You begin to get very innovative in how you think about your job when all of it is instrumental towards a bigger vision of what you want your life to be like. So that's what I would suggest, Elton. Go back, do some lifestyle such a career planning, see how work fits into that lifestyle,

and use that to guide your decisions. Do not consider your profession at this point in isolation. Do not say I have to consider just my work as my work and just focus on very narrow categories like my income or whether it's my passion. Fit it into the bigger picture. Now is a good time to do it. Now is a good time to take all of that career capital that you have accrued over the last 20 years in the working world and take it for a spin.

Make sure that you're leveraging it. Make sure that you're gaining more autonomy over what and how your life is like. So 40 is a great time to do that. Tune up. I'm down to, Jesse, I'm down to like six weeks, six or seven weeks until I turn. 440. Yeah. And then I make all the changes.

make all the changes. Big birthday project coming up? Yeah. Yeah, birthday projects are coming along. There's some big, some potentially bigger things I'm thinking about, not all professional related. But 40 has been a good energizer for dusting off some more lifestyle-centric career planning, exciting thoughts.

Most of them center around me becoming a professional HVAC repair man, but I'm going to crush it. I got to say, by the way, speaking, I'm joking because I talked about my air conditioner at the start of the last episode. I've never received more messages on any topic that we've talked about on this show. I received about people who are similarly obsessed about air conditioners. It's like a huge issue. We've talked about controversial topics.

We've talked about really philosophical topics. We've done topics that I'm a world expert on. No. Most messages we've ever gotten for a topic complaining about my air conditioner. A fun fact about my truck is it thought the AC's been broken for 20 years. I'm not surprised. In a DC, that's a lot of fun. I'm not surprised.

When I look at your truck, I think this is probably a vehicle in which in the mid-1980s, a ranch hand was murdered. That's what I think about. That's what I think about that truck, that the number of ranch hands on a West Texas ranch whose corpses have been carried in that truck to a ditch in the far pasture

to be buried is greater than zero. It isn't the queue to be painted but that queue like never. No, I like your paint job. You have like the old fashioned stripe, you know, the old Ford stripe. Is it, it's like tan? Yeah, they're going to get,

there's some rust and stuff. Yeah, yeah, the rust is an issue. Yeah. No, I like Jesse's truck. Yeah. And we need you to have it because when Elon Musk comes on the show. Yeah, I got to pick them up with OAC.

Yeah, we got to pick them up. Yeah, we got to pick up No, he's seeing the rusted. Actually, honestly, I don't think Elon Musk would even notice. Zuckerberg might notice. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, well.

I mean, look, I can't complain. I don't think a lot about cars. So I drive, the first car I ever owned, I bought it with my So Good They Can't Ignore You Advance. And bought in cash, it's like a $15,000, 2011 Honda Fit. They don't even make him anymore. It's a go-cart. If there's not a parking space,

I will bring it with me into the store. I'm just going to bring this thing. I bring this thing in because I don't care. But, you know, it's fine. I commute through DC on it. So between the two of us, remarkably unimpressive, the great line, vehicle drivers.

All right, Jesse, let's try some new technology. I want to do a Cal reacts to the news segment. We actually have the article right here on screen. for those of you who are watching this segment at YouTube.com slash Kalimaport Media, you will be able to actually see what I'm doing. You'll also be able to see all the sparks and smoke when this goes terribly. All right. So here's the article.

This was sent to me by a listener. It's by Elizabeth Klein. It's from February of 2021. And it is titled, a Catholic response to workism, call in how to lose. at life. So this is a Catholic response to issues about work and overwork. Because I wrote so much about this topic,

especially in my New Yorker column last fall, I found it interesting. I'm not going to go through this whole article, but I'm going to point out a few points that are made up front and then I'll give you my reactions to them. But let's start here in the beginning with a couple key notes that are being made by the author. So the author says, for everyone, for the vast majority of humans, life is not very glamorous,

involves doing a lot of boring and tedious things like paying taxes or cooking dinner or sweeping the floor. But she points out that these everyday tasks seem in particular to vex millennials. This generation, she goes on to say, has suffered from widespread ridicule for laziness and the inability. to grow up, but somewhat paradoxically, millennials also seem exhausted. All right. So this is a common thing we hear, but I want to point it out as part of the setup for this article.

She goes on to say when talking about us millennials problems is that we are, this already, I'm learning this technology pretty quickly. For those who are just listening, you're seeing me highlight things left and right that I don't mean to highlight as I learned a technology. Elizabeth also says millennials are frustrated

at being unable to obtain the same level of material wealth enjoyed by their parents. All right, so that's the setup. The article's then going to go into saying why this is or what's wrong with millennials, but that is the setup. So let me just start with this before we get into

the why. I will say in general, I have heard this a lot. I'm not super convinced. The issue here is to say almost everything being said here, I'm sure it could be said about just about every generation. A lot of these claims are just made. Are millennials unusually exhausted?

Are we unusually vexed by having to do small tasks, like more so than other people at our age? I don't know that that's true. I know it's widely said. I don't know that that's true. What about this idea which I hear all the time that we're frustrated that our parents have more money in houses than we do? Again, I'm not super impressed by that claim. what is the biggest predictor of how much money or wealth you're going to have? Well, one of the biggest predictors is how old are you?

How long have you had to actually make money? How long if you had to actually trade up your house three or four times? How long have you had to be putting money into your retirement account? So I don't think it's some unusual thing that 70-year-old baby boomers have nicer houses and more money than their 30-year-old kids. And I'm sure that's true of every generation that, oh, my parents, we've been around a lot longer, have more stuff than I have than when I'm younger. So I just want to lay out that foundation that I'm not acceding the ground that is made at the beginning of this article. I'm not acceding the ground to this argument that, of course, us millennials are all vexed and overwhelmed and upset at our parents and worried about our prospects.

I'm not sure that exactly matches a lot of my day-to-day interactions, but you know, that could be true. It could be true for other people. But let me just start with that. All right. So why is this the case? there's a couple options given here. There's three points in particular that I want to point out. All right.

So first, this article talks about Anne Helen Peterson's viral BuzzFeed article, how millennials became the burnout generation. She went on to publish a book about this as well. The book was called Can't Even. So this was an article that did a lot for promoting this idea that millennials have a hard time doing small tasks. Here is Helen's argument, or Anne's argument, rather. All right, so she puts forward the idea that millennials basically work all the time,

and then what they are non-working, they are busy trying to excel in other ways. So she goes on to say, drinking enough water, going to the gym, or running a marathon, eating at trendy restaurants, and then sharing all these experiences on social media for the perfect Instagram life. So I'll label this number one. This is point number one. We'll come back to that. All right. second argument is pointed out here about what's going on with millennials

actually comes from the Ezra Klein show. So there was a interview Ezra did with Anne Helen Peterson, but also with Derek Thompson, who wrote an article about workism for the Atlantic, and it reiterated some of these big ideas. But what was interesting is, according to this author, this conversation took a surprising turn, So here we go.

Near the end of the podcast, the discussion takes a surprising turn. And that turn is towards religion, right? So that takes a surprising term towards religion. Derek Thompson goes on in that interview to talk about, and I'm going to highlight this, but he goes on to comment, this was unprompted by Ezra. When you are religious, you do not require the social feedback loop. you do not need a public performance of your life to make it valuable.

All right. So let's make this our second point. Interesting about trying to explain what's going on with millennials, this notion that maybe it is religion that is missing. Millennials that are religious have an outlet. This drive towards wanting to live a good life. They now have an outlet for that. And they don't have to try to simulate it with performative,

action online, etc. There's one final point given in this article. This comes from the author, the author herself, and this is the focus on capitalism. So we usually get back here. She says, as capitalism has become the religion of most Americans, so the measures of the worth in our lives has become our product. So capitalism is the focus here.

She goes on to elaborate. My life has become a brand. This is why millennials can both seem to be obsessed with work and not yet value hard work at all. So there's this notion of there's a capitalist impulse. We'll make this point number three. There's a capitalist impulse that gets us to constantly want to somehow support our brand. And so we're not going to tolerate efforts that don't directly do that and we have a hard time. All right, so we have three arguments here.

We have three arguments for why supposedly millennials are exhausted and having a hard time doing even simple tasks. Number one is Anne Helen Peterson's argument that we're always trying to optimize performatively. Number two is Derek Thompson's argument that we don't have religion. We're trying to fill that hole. We're not doing a very good job of it. And number three is it's a capitalist impulse. Okay. So what do I think about this?

I think of these three options, the person who is probably most on to something is Derek Thompson. Point number two. So let me work through point one and three first. I'll say why I have some concern about it. My issue with Anne's argument that it's all about Instagram performance is that I believe that's a much that exists, but it's a much more narrow tranche of all of the millennials in this country that it might actually seem if you're someone who is quote unquote very online. So yes, there is this hustle culture on Instagram, which honestly, I didn't even really know about it until enough reporters asked me about it.

So there is a subset of Instagram users that are all about posting these inspirational quotes, these get after it style quotes, these bragging about how much they're working style quotes. There's also a echo of the subculture on YouTube. In the student space, for example, there's these YouTube videos of people who will study on camera, usually time lapse for eight, nine hours in a row. So there is a sort of performative, a celebration of hustle that does happen online, but I think it's actually a pretty narrow audience. Most millennials, especially as they get older, you know, millennials are now in their 30s, millennials in their upper 20s. I don't know that so many of them are so plugged into their social media presences as the main driving thing. I think as they get older, there's other things going on in their lives. They're getting married.

They're having kids. The more important stuff is happening in their jobs. And so I've never been as big of a believer that we can extrapolate the most eye-catching things we see on Instagram to YouTube to an entire generation. It just doesn't pass the test of matching all of the people I know who are millennials. You would think if something is a very widespread trend, you would see it popping up at least at a relatively high background rate. So I think that might be a little bit exaggerated. Honestly, most millennials I know of a certain age are mainly just, exhausted with social media.

Now, again, we might be mixing up generations. We have to be careful about that. People still use the term millennial to mean everyone who's young. It's no longer the case. I'm one of the older millennials born in 1982, so I'm 40. The youngest millennials, though, are in their upper 20s now. So, I mean, sometimes when people say millennials, they're actually talking about Jin Ziers or talking about people who are, you know, in their young 20s or teen years now.

That's a whole other generation. This is the generation that grew up with a native use of smartphones and social media. That's a whole different thing. But millennials, honestly, I think there's also a strong thread of, you know, they're on some social media, but it's not a major player in their life. All right. Let's jump ahead to number three, the capitalism critique. There's a lot of this going on right now. It's like our entire cultural conversation is, you know, hanging out on campus when the freshmen are going home.

Like everyone has taken their first sort of Marxist influence, whatever critical course. And now we're confidently explaining to their parents how it's all bourgeois capitalist influence. There's a lot of this going on right now. We're going back to these sort of Marxist critiques. Here's the thing. There's not like there's something new going on with capitalism, I would say, generationally. So if capitalism was driving you to these issues, it's not that there's some big change necessarily that happened in capitalism, let's say, during. the last 10 years. It wasn't there 10 years before that or 20 years before that.

So there obviously are issues with capitalism, but I don't think it's the right explanation for what's different about this generation versus other generations that came before. It is Derek who I think is on to something. I think the gap here, the issue here is a meaning gap. I think this is an issue with millennials. It's an issue with every generation. How do you structure a good and meaningful life? I think most people are willing for a good and meaningful life to have hardships to require effort,

to require toil to have ups and downs. People crave meaning much more strongly than almost anything else. And there can be an absence of that. And in the absence of that, I do think people flounder. And I think when you flounder, lots of effects can happen. Lots of effects can happen. So yes, you can get burnout on doing seeming trivial task. back in my student advice days, we used to call this deep procrastination.

If you get sufficiently mismatched between intrinsic motivation and the efforts you actually have to do, you can shut down your motivational centers and have a hard time doing even basic things. It's similar to depressive syndrome, but not quite the same. There's probably a lot of that going on. Clearly, I think there is exhaustion issues with work. Where does that come from? Well, as I've argued, I think, in the modern age of digital knowledge work, we get more

and more ad hoc frequent communication, all the context switching as job roles get more ambiguous. I think that's just fundamentally exhausting. So yeah, I think that is, I think that really is an issue that's going on as well. I think people are hungry. We see, you know, strong embraces of all sorts of theoretical frameworks for an academic, for example, to see something as obscure and complex as postmodern influence critical theories, which is in academic circles is like a very narrow thing. It's not like most professors in the humanities are coming at their work from a perspective of a postmodern influence critical theories. But they have a huge impact right now in our culture at large, that you have huge swaths of my generation that is quoting like relatively subtle. But 15 years ago would have been something you only would have heard in a pretty high level graduate seminar, pretty subtle theoretical frameworks.

I think it's because it's attached to social justice that seems meaningful. We're looking for meaning. We see that. I mean, you see it in a completely different context with the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the Q&N, et cetera. Look, say what you will about Q&N, but you can't say you don't feel like your life has meaning when you are stopping pedophile rings that live in secret subterranean tunnels beneath the city. You got something that you're locked into. So I think Thompson is on to something that the meaning gap is probably what's important for millennials. what millennials need and what Gen Z needs is some sort of coherent story about how to build a meaningful life in the face of inevitable suffering and hardship. I think that is where the huge hunger is.

I see it in the Gen Z college students I teach. I see it in my millennial peers. I see it in the generations in between. This is what I believe people need. I believe this is probably what the issue is. I think we see that hunger. out there. And I think it's what needs to be addressed.

Now, I don't know if the answer is, you know, this, this particular article comes from a Catholic, is a Catholic perspective. And so it might say Catholicism. I don't think there's a specific answer. Like, you need a religion to do this or this or that. But I think that meaning gap, I think that's a big thing that's going on here. A universities aren't addressing it. The baby boomer generations aren't passing down this to their, to their kids very well.

They got too distracted with just having a family and living life and trying to figure out life in their generation. Everyone has their own things going on. But that hunger, I think that hunger is out there. And there should be more people discussing concrete answers to that hunger. Not one. There could be many, but people should be thinking, how am I structuring my life? How do I want to structure a deep existence in a world of both shallowness and

hardship? So I think that's what's important. And the reason why I emphasize that is that otherwise, if we look at some of these other things being said here, which, which again, have some foundation and true. truth. I don't want to completely dismiss it. It's easy just to see this through the point of view of like, look, there's nothing these kids can do. There's these other influences that

are bad. So you guys sit tight and we'll go write polemics and try to like change the circumstances that are making your life hard. That can be really disempowering. And I think that's a thread that goes to a lot of this. This sort of what can even do? You know,

it's just culture and capitalism and the way our exploitative bosses are trying to trying to take advantage of us. And so we need to leave it to like polemical writers to try to change the society and change to culture. And in the meantime, we should just, you know, go easy on ourselves, get back on Instagram. I don't think that's what's going to help people.

We need people to come in and demonstrate in their life. Here is my structure for a life of meaning amidst inevitable hardship. Mental difficulty. You see these exemplars out there, challenge people to stand up and introduce some structure into their life to introduce some pursuit beyond the arbitrary or in the moment. There is such a hunger for that. Anyways, I'm rambling,

but that is where that's where I land on that. So there we go. So what do you think, Jesse, our technology worked? I think it's pretty cool. Nothing caught on fire. Nothing caught on fire. So we have two new things today because we put the boom in. Oh, the boom is awesome. Yeah. So you can't see this at home, but I'm in a, I'm seeing at a big roundtable.

And Jesse's on the other side of this round table, right? So we're kind of looking right at each other. Our computer that we run everything through is way off to the side. So it's very difficult to see. We have to look over at this computer way over at the side to do anything with it. Jesse has installed this crazy boom arm. So we can now pick up this big IMAX screen and move it, move it right over here to look at, move it right over to Jesse to look at.

If I'm doing Zoom, I can have it near the camera. And so, yeah, we're high tech in here today. It kind of feels like a completely different setup. Feels good. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. And then with the iPad and you're going to be able to do some cool stuff with that.

Yeah. So look, I'm getting used to this, everyone who's watching the first episode. I want to be able to the diagram ideas. I want to get better at reacting to articles and underline. We're working on the tech here. But the point is the tech is now in place. and now we can focus on improving it. And this is part of why we went down the one episode a week for the summer is trying to figure things out, make the show better.

Speaking of the show and making it better, let's talk about some of the sponsors that allow us to keep buying boom arms and trying to figure out how to hook up iPads to our screen. And that is ladder. So in our last segment, we were talking about finding meaning in your life. Well, as long as we're talking about the preciousness of life, we should also mention. life insurance. If you're a millennial, one of those small tasks you need to do, you might be finding a hard time motivating yourself to do is get life insurance. In particular, you need term life insurance coverage, which is surprisingly affordable. Don't worry. So how do you figure out how to find a good insurance policy that gets you what you need? It's not too expensive, but helps you protect

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We got a question from Frank. Frank asks, what kind of processes you go through to figure out what projects you commit to? I feel that much of the conversation of productivity is around figuring out how to tackle everything that is on my plate. There is advice and working efficiently through that as well as ways to get some of the stuff off my plate. This is all great stuff. But what about making sure that the work that I get put on my plate is the best choice for my skills and my goals? Well, Frank, this is a perfect excuse for me to remind everyone about the productivity funnel. A concept from earlier in the podcast I think is worth reviewing because it's very relevant to your question.

Let me see here. I actually could draw a picture. In theory, I'm going to draw a picture of the funnel. So here we have, for those who are watching at home, we now have the screen back up. So just for those who don't remember, the productivity funnel has three levels. which I will expertly draw. Keeping in mind all three levels is what's going to be important for actually getting a good answer to your question here, Frank.

All right, so if we're going to label these levels, what are we going to get? At the bottom is where we have, and people who are watching along at home, see, I have impeccable handwriting. I'm still learning this pen. I don't know, Jesse, what would you think? That looks like someone having a stroke

because they were drinking too much. And in the middle of that process, the drunk person having a stroke was writing the word. So I'll rewrite it. So what I was trying to write here is the word execution. I'm labeling the bottom,

the bottom level of the three level funnel. There we go. That looks better. Yeah, that's good. With execution. Above that, the middle level of the productivity funnel, we can label

organization. And then the top level, and this is where it gets relevant, Frank, let's just summarize, I call us different things, but for now let's call it selection. All right, so we have this funnel. Selection, organization, and execution. Whoops, I just accidentally moved everything on the screen. Not to worry. Boom. Now we're back.

All right. And so what happens is you have a lot of possible things. coming into this. Oh, man. I'm doing all sorts of interesting things on my screen down here. There we go. Oh, my goodness. There we go.

I'm getting good at this. It's not riveting radio, but I'm actually making a lot of progress and understanding this technology. So you have a bunch of possible activities coming to the top of this productivity funnel. And let me just scroll this up so we can see it. And then what happens?

Okay. All right. So now I have the whole picture. drawn, again, for those listening at home, I'm sure you love the riveting radio here, but I have a three-level funnel drawn. At the top, widest part of the funnel is selection. The middle level of the funnel is organization. At the bottom is execution. And there's a bunch of stuff coming in the top of the funnel. These are potential activities. So when it comes to productivity, there's three parts to it. Selection is actually trying to figure out of these things that are

incoming, of these things that are incoming to the funnel, which of them in my actually going to bring into my system and actually hope to execute at some point. So a lot of the things coming in get blocked right at this point. We'll talk about more about this in a second, Frank, because it's at the core of your question. But just so you know how these pieces fit together, the things that make it through selection then have to be organized. So where they kept track of, where is the information associated with them getting track of, where is the plans that may lay out how they're executed, when do those plans get made,

how do those plans get consulted, what role do they have in their life? All of that happens within organization. So, for example, this is where you'll have capture systems. This is where you're going to have your quarterly, weekly planning, your quarterly, weekly planning where you're figuring out big picture plans. That goes down to a weekly plan. You figure out what should be doing each day. So there's a lot of work that goes into organizing what's on your plate.

And then often missed is the bottom smallest level of the funnel, which is execution. We figure out, well, now that I know what I'm supposed to be doing right now, how do I do it? Okay. And this is where things like deep work for the shallow work, minimizing context, switching, rituals, locations, scheduling philosophies, all the things you do to actually execute your work at the highest level. That goes there. This is also where tools that make you more efficient when you're doing shallow tasks that would benefit from efficiency, they would go here as well. All three of these go into this big picture idea of productivity. Now, Frank, based on your question, you're focusing when you think about productivity mainly on the middle. level organization. A lot of people make that same distinction. So the nuts and bolts of how I keep track of and schedule and organize everything on my plate, people often think about that's what productivity means. But that's just the middle part.

You need it. Without it, it's chaos. You're the list reactive method, just pulling things off of your inbox and trying to keep your head above water. But it is not by itself going to give you a complete approach to being productive. That is having a. transition from possible inputs to outputs that matches whatever criteria are important to you. You're going to need that activity selection to come in place first.

So what I'm trying to do here with this funnel, Frank, is emphasize that figuring out what to bring onto your plate or not should be at the core of any thinking about productivity. And this is deep thinking. I mean, this is figuring out, like, what do I do for a living? What is my role? What are the things I'm going to focus on my role? What are the things that are overwhelming me? What is the work volume I can actually manage?

And where am I now and am I beyond it? and how do I figure out how not to go beyond it? This is where you have the hard conversations with your boss. It's where you do deep to shallow work track it and use those metrics to say this is too much on my plate. It's where when you move something from just individual messages in which work is implicitly attached, you move over towards something transparent, like a task board, where you can see all of the work that needs to be done and who's doing what. So you can point to that and say, look at how overloaded this is.

This is where when you switch from push to pole, Okay, I have another free slot. Hey, everyone, what should I do next? As opposed to just send me stuff when you think of it and I'll take care of it. All of these things fall under the rubric of activity selection. And it is the part of the funnel that gets the least amount of attention. Organization is like the meaty, sexy stuff, right? Oh, my God, I have my notion thing set up and I'm using Trello in the sophisticated way and I have these different planners.

That's like the meaty productivity prong stuff. execution, that bottom part of the funnel, that's the real fun stuff. That's the, you know, I built my deep work shed and I go through the hike through the woods. That's really fulfilling and fun. It's to try to in the moment

getting the most out of your work. But activity selection gets ignored. Even though it's the very top of the funnel. So it impacts everything that comes below. It's what gets ignored. And a lot of the issues we have right now, I think in knowledge work, the burnout issues, the overload issues,

all comes from ignoring activity selection and instead just letting stuff fly at us randomly doing our best to keep our head above water and occasionally calling uncle when it becomes too hard to stay afloat. So Frank, I want you to emphasize activity selection. I want to encourage you to keep in mind that this is hard. I want to underscore the notion that there's many different things that go into trying to figure out that activity selection piece of your funnel. It's not just a simple strategy you can put in the place tomorrow,

but I'm glad you're thinking about it, and it's what you really need to be focusing on. I'm getting better at this, Jesse, I would say. I still have quite a few bumps in my pin handling, but I like this tablet. And also I'm a fantastic artist. I think people who are listening and not watching the YouTube video, so they can't confirm this,

let me just say what I drew the productivity funnel was beautiful, perfectly proportional, well-shaded, my handwriting is fantastic. And for those who can see this on the video, don't tell them. That's not nearly true. Related to golf, it's like,

but you're also like using other people's clubs. So like once you get your apple pen, you'll be, you know, cruising. That's true. So I teach with the same software. So when I,

when I teach in the classroom, I was a blackboard teacher because I do theory and mathematics and I don't, I don't want to show PowerPoint slides. There's a natural pacing to writing. But my hands are, handwriting is very bad and a lot of the chalkboards at Georgetown are no good. They're pitted,

so you erase them once and the whole thing is white. And so I figured out it was really the pandemic that forced me to switch over to this technology. During the pandemic, I began when we were doing Zoom teaching using my iPad as a whiteboard and to know it shared the screen on Zoom. And so then when we got back into the classroom last year, I realized, oh, I could project my iPad on the big screen at the front of the room. And so now I'm writing on my iPad. And so now I'm writing on my iPad, but it's projected up on the big screen. So it's equivalent to me writing on a big whiteboard, except for it's on my iPad, and I can save all the notes and send them to the students, and I can scroll and go back to things I wrote before. So we're using the exact same setup here for the show.

So you think I'd be quicker at it. But I am using Jesse's pin. Yeah, which isn't as good as your pen. That's true. I have a good pin. All right, what are we at here? Ooh, 120. Let's do one more quick question, Jesse, and then we'll call it quits. This last one comes from Oscar. Oscar asks, How should I organize my circle of friends and acquaintances in order to make them stop texting me via WhatsApp? I'm going to give you three suggestions, Oscar. All of these suggestions are going to be built on this foundational observation that I make in my book, Digital Minimalism, which is that this is actually the area in your personal technology life that is the hardest to change. By hardest, I mean the area where you're going to get the most pushback.

people worry about social media. Oh, if as part of becoming a digital minimalist, I stop using social media as much, all of these bad things might happen. I'm not going to be able to grow my business. People are going to miss me and where are you? I'm going to disappear from the public discourse, etc., etc.

But in reality, when people embrace minimalism, it's text messaging, instant messaging. Back and forth conversations with people they know on apps, that's the hardest place to change. their behavior. They leave Twitter, no one notices. They leave WhatsApp and a private investigator is knocking at their door with a corpse sniffing dog. So let me just make that at the foundation. I feel your pain Oscar. But I'm going to give you three ways to make this transition away from constant WhatsApp accessibility. Three suggestions to give you. One, I would say apologize instead of

instructing. So instead of trying to instruct people, okay, everyone in my family, okay, all my friends. Here's how I'm using WhatsApp now. Here's the right way to get in touch with me. Everyone will get defensive. It's the guy with his one day AA chip going to the bar and lecturing about alcohol. People are going to get defensive. So I would say instead, just switch to your new rules for using instant messengers, whatever those rules are, and apologize when people complain. You just simply get ready to say a bunch at first, oh, sorry, yeah, I don't keep WhatsApp open when I'm working on work or I don't keep WhatsApp open when I'm exercising. Whatever it is.

Keep apologizing. Right. And people will eventually get it. Like, oh, I guess Oscar doesn't keep WhatsApp open. So I cannot expect that if I send them something, he's going to get back to me right away. They're not defensive because you're not telling them that's better. They're not defensive because you're not telling them, don't bother me.

You're apologizing. But the apology is sneaky, sneaky effective. Because even if it annoys them that they can't reach you because you don't keep WhatsApp open at work. It's a hard argument for them to make, hey, Oscar, no, no, that's unacceptable. You need to be monitoring WhatsApp at work. When they actually put in the words what they're doing and what in the moment they're hoping you would be doing, it seems somewhat absurd. And so they don't. Two, provide a higher friction emergency option. This is actually an idea that came up. We called it escape valves in my book, A World Without Email. By the way, I don't know why I use

this Royal Wee. Have you noticed this, Jesse? I've noticed this more. more podcast and videos, there's this real temptation to use we, even when it's, it's not we, you know, I guess it makes it seem like everyone has big teams or seems more important, but I don't think it actually works. I think it just sounds weird, but look, I just did it there. I said, you know, in a world without email, we, there's no we. It's a book I wrote. There's not a, there's not a team, a crack scientist that got together to put together this book. So I'm trying to be better about that. Or if I'm talking about this show, I'll just say like, Bessie and I.

I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, there's a lot of that goes on now. Podcasts or YouTubers. They all want to emphasize their teams. Like there's some

a large office building that all their, all their workers are in. Anyways, in my book, a world without email when I was talking about in a, it's a slightly different context, but people reworking

professional communication protocols. So there's less ad hoc messaging. I talked a lot about the important of an escape valve. So you give people a way that they can contact you and get an immediate answer in the case of an emergency, but it's a higher friction solution. So like you have to call me.

It's something that's higher friction. Not impossible about higher friction. No one really is going to use it, but it provides people a psychological piece knowing if I did need to use it, I could. Right? So people might be worried in your family or your circle of friends if they're thinking you know Oscar's not on this but

what if there's an emergency what if we really need them my goodness like maybe this is better that you're on it but if they have an escape valve oh this is how you get me if it's really urgent and I'm not on WhatsApp then that issue that concern goes away you're not worried about that anymore it also again I don't mean to keep coming back to this I don't mean to be villainizing your family and friends Oscar but it diffuses potential defensive responses because there's a response, it's like, hey, look, I need you. I need you to be on WhatsApp because I'm swinging by, you know, your mother-in-law is. Like, I have to swing by to drop something off and I need to know if you're there.

If they have the escape valves, like, yeah, but you know what you can do. You can call me. It's a bit more of a pain, but it's there and you can do that. No one will actually use it. Escape valves are all about the piece. Finally, consider personal communication office hours. So I was reminded of this idea. I mean, I first heard this idea from an entrepreneur I know named Chris Ye.

And then I talked to Chris the other day. So it reminded me of this concept that he had innovated years ago. But Chris had office hours every day during roughly the same time when he was commuting from his office back to his house. He's in San Francisco. Maybe he was on the 101. And there's traffic. So he knew there was a 45-minute period where I'd always be in my car. And so he had personal communication office hours for people who knew him, friends, family members.

You can always call me during that time. And so it's a way that he could stay in touch with people and have serendipitous conversations and see what's going on without have to constantly be monitoring some other type of asynchronous communication media. And so personal communication office hours are a great way of maintaining connection when people are used to being able to just outsource that to doing quick messages back and forth. Now you're like, hey, call me, man.

Call me. This is my time I'm available. When are you going to call me? Or if they're texting you and you don't see it until three hours later, you're like, just call me up my next, call me. Call me, you know, you can always call me at these hours. Call me next time you can. Let's talk about it.

So it's a way to have connection with people with, again, not having to monitor that screen all the time. All right, Oscar, so that's what I'd recommend. I think you're thinking about the right thing. I do not think the constant monitoring of instant messenger type channels is compatible with a deep life by almost any definition. It is an issue, but it's also really hard to get past. Those are the three things I would keep in mind.

People will still complain, but they'll complain a lot. less if you do those three things. It is worth it. You just can't live a focused life if every four minutes you have to check and jump in on an asynchronous back and forth conversation. So reform your WhatsApp usage. If they still complain, you can blame it on me. All right, Josie, that's a good tight hour and 28 minutes.

So we should probably wrap this up. Thank everyone who sent in their questions and calls. If you liked what you heard, you will like what you see at our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. You'll also like what you read in my weekly email newsletter and sign up at calnewport.com. We're back next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.