Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 197: I’m Writing a New Book

Episode Date: May 23, 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/calnewportmediaThe Overlooked Radicalism of Tim Ferriss [13:53]QUESTIONS:- Is it time for a career change or do I just lack discipline? [37:30]- Do occasional leaks mean that my productivity system is broken? [46:02]- LISTENER CALL: How should this exhausted professorI structure her sabbatical? [50:16]Habit Tune-Up: The Corner Marking Method [59:03]- Why use a paper notebook for Time-blocking instead of an app? [1:20:58]- How can I do longer Deep Work sessions? [1:26:48]Thanks to our Sponsors:Trybasis.com/CalWren.co/DeepExpressVPN.com/DeepNovo.co/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 197. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I hope you're doing okay. I'm struggling a little bit. I was watching with dread over the last few weeks as this particularly nasty cold moved from member of my family to member of my family. getting ever closer, finally got me last night.

So I am hopped up on Sudafed. But I have to say I'm upset because I thought we had an agreement with the longstanding viruses of the world, the cold viruses, the flu viruses. They get November. They get December, January, February, March. We'll even give them early April. You want to come along in early April and catch us with one of those spring colds?

Okay, we'll give that to you. But mid-May, like we're too late. not the agreement. This is too late for these cold and flu viruses to be circulate. Now look, the new coronavirus, the SARS-CoV-2, that gets a pass for now. It's still new. It hasn't settled into its seasonal pattern yet. So, you know, it's allowed to do what it does whenever. But the long-standing ones, like what I have now, I thought we had an agreement. So I'm upset about that. There's no time left. There's actually a theory about that. So my sister is a ER doc. And she was saying, in this area, they're seeing flu late.

Flu is lasting later than normal. And so one of the ideas, and we're all expert epidemiologists today, right? Because we saw things on Twitter and read articles in the Atlantic. So we can all be experts on this. But one of the theories going around is in this area, when Omicron hit in January, so all of the sort of dual income Zoom remote workers that live around here, started getting coronavirus for the first time, they really pulled back on activities. and that would have been the period where you really would be kicking off flu and cold.

So like that whole season got delayed a little bit. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's one possible explanation. The other one is that God hates this podcast. So it's just his way. Well, at least the sun's coming out now. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. The whole point is you're supposed to be able to enjoy physically beautiful weather without a cold.

Oh, well. But we persist. We move on. I don't want to use the word hero lightly. But I would say I am perhaps one of my generation's greatest heroes for podcasting through a cold. Let's do a little bit of news and announcements. I think I can officially announce now, Jesse, that I am writing a new book. We have the deal in place for actually two new books.

It's not yet, I guess, signed contracts in the publishing world take a long time to actually work through all the details. The lawyers get involved. But we're drafting the announcement for the trade presses this morning. So I figure that's as good as time as any to make the announcement. So slow productivity will be the next book I publish. I think early 2024, sort of winter, early spring, 2024. That will be followed by the deep life. So I'm really going to take my time on that one.

That's going to be a little bit more journalistic. So slow productivity followed by the deep life. Those will be my next two books here in the U.S. that will be once again with portfolio imprint over at Penguin Random House. So you're fired up? Yeah, I'm back in it. I'm writing. I'm writing.

Here's what I'm doing. Let me give a little bit of nuts and bolts here. So what's my, what's my procedure? What's going on with this? Because I figure I want to give some updates about the book writing. I was finishing a book when I started the podcast. But this is really the first time I'm fully working on a book from start to ending since the podcast began. So I figured this would be a good chance to give some check-ins for the listener about my process and how it's going.

So I'll say right now, because my semester is over at Georgetown, I'm in summer. I'm writing every day, writing every morning with the exception of Saturday. So I talked about this on a previous episode that this would be my schedule. I am implementing that schedule every morning I write. I'm interleaving right now, loosely speaking, two different chapters. So just again, to give you an insight into my writing process, The slow productivity book will have two parts. There's a first part that's more expository, setting up the issue and the need for a new philosophy.

And the second part is focusing on the principles of slow productivity, which are to do fewer things, working at a natural pace while obsessing over quality. So this is the deep work structure. I'm interleaving first chapter of the part one, first chapter of that part two. So I'm going back and forth between the two. So I'm working on one until I get to a milestone, then working on another until I get to a milestone, switching back to the other. So I'm going to go back and forth.

I'm working on those two chapters in parallel. So I'm about 4,000 words into that first chapter of Part 2. Next week I'll be probably turning my attention to that first chapter of Part 1 until I reach a natural stopping point, then return to the Part 2 chapter. So that's what I'm doing right now. I will say the chapter in part one. I'm overlapping some of the research I need for that with the

latest piece I'm writing for the New Yorker. So I'm getting some double duty out of a New Yorker piece I'm working on now. That opens a lot of doors. It's easier to get interviews. And so that piece, I'm working on the research for that now with my research assistant. And then I'll switch to writing that. Just to give you a sense of how it goes. So I'm often maybe interleaving at most two chapters writing one to four hours a day.

And we will see how that unfolds. But like I say, Jesse, I'm happy to be back into it. You know I had that spring that was full of administrative work. Yeah. This is the opposite. And I think you can guess which one I'm happier about. So do you work on the Deep Life book at all, too? No.

Okay. So I am immersing myself in slow productivity. Now, you got to keep in mind, I'm handing in this manuscript early 2023. Yeah. And there's a long production process for books. So that is when I'll turn my attention to the new book

pretty hardcore. Do a lot of authors sign two books at once? Not really. This is one of my hallmarks, I suppose, but it's not super common. I did it for my last two books as well. So digital minimalism and I rolled without email, which was with the same imprint at Penguin,

that was a two book deal. and then I'm doing a two-book deal now. It's not standard. It's not super rare. The basic idea, it's not like there's gamesmanship here. The basic idea, and this is the way my literary agent talks about it, is that if you have two ideas that you really love, well, you might as well sell them both at the same time because there's overhead to selling books. It's a pain, logistically speaking, to put together proposals.

I've been working on these proposals since last July. Did you add the ideas when you were working on? digital minimalism in a world without email? I mean, I really started working seriously on these ideas about a year and a half ago. So it takes me a long time. So it takes me a long time, but I really like both of these ideas. I mean, again, just to peek a little bit behind the covers, I've been focused primarily on the deep life. That's what had emerged from the podcast.

And it was resonating and the pandemic was changing people's mindset. It's a very important topic. I want to do that book right. but as I was working on that, slow productivity arose as a concept on the podcast, also on my blog, on my interview I did with Ferris, some other things, and it really caught something that was going on in the moment. And so at some point I said, you know what, I want to write both of these things. Slow productivity is very much of the moment. I want to do that first.

It's probably a shorter book. And so I was like, well, sell them both. So it's not, again, there's not a huge strategy to it beyond if you have two ideas you love, you might as well sell them both because then. you don't have to worry about that whole process again. You can just write. And when you're done with one book, you can just switch to the other. You don't have to spend a year trying to get a proposal together, take it on shopping it. So I like it. I like the stability. I like to know this is what I'm doing for the next five years. I mean, to me, that's important. But again,

it's not exceedingly rare, but it's also not super common to do two book deals. So our friend Ryan Holiday, who's on the same imprint. So we all publish in the same places. He's also, also a portfolio author. He's in the middle of, he's one book into a four book deal. Right. So, you know, it's, it's all relative. Now, in his case, it makes sense for there to be four because he's doing one for each of the cardinal virtues. So that kind of makes sense. With one last question, with your research assistant, how does that work? Have you even worked with the same one for a long time? You've met him. Yeah. Remember Caleb? Oh. Oh. He's coming by next week. Yeah. This is a part time. We're just sort of trying to

it out. So you haven't worked with him before. Yeah, he was actually a student of mine from back in the day. He did a master's degree at Georgetown and I've done some research with him. And he's just interested. You know, it's just something he's interested in. So he helped me with an article that is actually a cool New Yorker piece. It's a long one. I haven't done a long one in a while that we're in the, it's in copy editing right now. So stay tuned for that. I'll talk about it when it's out. But he helped me do some background on that. And so he's helping me on this, on this new piece as well. Have you had a research as before? No, but it's great.

You get like a lay of the land. It's really useful. It doesn't stop me from obviously reading in depth a lot of sources, but it gives me the lay of the land and helps me find what to read. I'm enjoying it. Yeah. Yeah.

So we'll see. He's stopping by the studio next week after we record to talk through some research thing. Yeah, so you'll see you'll see Caleb again. So anyways, that's going on. So I'm excited about it. I'm riding. I'm rock and rolling. Makes me, makes me happy. Even more important, at least according to the response we get from our listeners about different topics. I am replacing my upstairs air conditioning system. All right. This is, I know people were waiting to hear this update. I'm finally riding off the system upstairs. It's leaking like a sieve. The, what do you call it? The coils are rust covered from like, like, like leaks. It's underpowered for the current intensity of DC summers. We're wrenching it out

two weeks from now, putting in a very nice carrier variable speed infinity unit that is with this going to be able to, uh, this is going to be able to take me from moderate capacity for warm days to big capacity for hot days. It's energy efficient. I've never been more excited about something, Jesse. We're also going to do professional re-insulation of the attic. We're spending all the dollars, all the dollars on this because you know what? I want to be so secure about my upstairs conditioning of my air that I want it to be a source of pride, not a source of stress. I will go through any number of hoops to make that happen. So that's probably the biggest news of the month, air conditioner replacement. Second biggest news, two book deal. So like,

put these in their in their proper so the downstairs unit is fine it's okay but and so that's where the new library is right yeah yeah oh and that's going in so finally the temperature be good there yeah it's pretty the the downstairs system works fine because that's where you write right that's where I'm going to be writing so okay update number three this is good just we got lots of news the the deep work study um the the bookshelves it's all custom bookshelves the whole room is getting filled with custom bookshelves and they're painting them. And I think they're coming next week, the carpenter, to start actually installing them. So I am really excited about that. That is going to be where I write in the study surrounded by books. And the temperature is going to be good.

It's good. Downstairs is fine. Okay. Yeah, downstairs works fine. Yeah. So I'm not as worried about that. So that's exciting. So the deep work study, we will film some videos from there once that's up and running, Jesse and I have some ideas that will do some short videos from inside the sort of inner sanctum of my riding world. Right now, honestly,

I'm doing a lot of riding outside. The weather's great. I sit on my porch and just the post of my porch sort of frame, a tree, and a bush, and it's like riding in front of a big picture window. So right now I'm happy riding outside,

but I'm glad this study is coming. You still got a random coffee shop? Yeah, I've been writing a lot at Bevco, plug. I was just there this morning. I think I was there. I've been there twice already. Today? No, this week. I have been there twice today, yes. But I mean, in terms of writing, I've written there at least twice this week. I've been doing that more. I get breakfast there sometimes. So I'll get breakfast and write at the tables inside. And that's good. Yeah, I've got to change it up. Maybe I'll be doing that less once the studies up and running. So, all right, those are all of the updates. one other update, I guess I will add, is that, as I told Jesse today, earlier today, I've returned to the Tim Ferriss podcast. So, you know, whatever it was, a month or two ago,

I was on the show, Tim interviewed me for the show. This week, so actually the week before this will come out, so the week immediately preceding when this episode airs, there's another episode that Tim just published where it's me interviewing Tim. It's an episode sort of me interviewing Tim in particular about the rise of the four-hour work week. What went into that, what was what that moment was like, what was happening right before, what was the event that sparked it. Now, this was an interview I actually did. This would have been last year. I was interviewing Tim for a New Yorker article I was writing about the four-hour work week. And that article came out last fall. And as we're getting closer to do that interview,

Tim had this idea. He said, well, why don't we record it? Because maybe if it's interesting, you know, he interviews everyone else who gets to interview him. He doesn't go on other people's shows, right? So he's not interviewed that often. He's like, why don't we record it just in case it's interesting? So actually, this episode that was just released on Tim's feed is a recording of an interview I was doing of him for a New Yorker article I was writing about him and his book. So that is the origin story. Now, of course, once I knew that we were recording it, I did the interview more podcast style. So I don't want to give those who listen to that episode the idea that this is what magazine interviews sound like. It's more scripted and polished. Real magazine interviews are

way less formal. But that's the origin of that Ferris episode. So I thought what would be interesting, Jesse, today is to go back to that article that I wrote about them. So for those of you who listened to the interview on Tim's feed and are curious about the article it led to, I want to revisit that article and talk about the three big points I extracted from talking to Tim. So the three big points are going to be number one, the unlikely circumstances under which the four-hour work week broke out and became a big hit. Number two, the subsequent dismissal of that book by the broader cultural conversation. And number three, why I think it's Tim's most.

radical work to date and that we underestimate today the radicalness of what he was actually claiming in that book. Those were three big points from the article. I want to go through those briefly today. For those who are watching this on the video instead of listening to it, I'm actually going to pull up the article here on our new Fancy Pants Telestrator. So you can actually see the parts of the article I'm talking about as I talk about it. For those who are just listening, don't worry. You'll still get the gist of what I mean. All right. So let's start with this first point. Here's the article, revisiting the four-hour work week. I want to start with this context of why it was unlikely the way that Tim's book broke out. So let's talk about timing.

So the big event that broke out Tim's book came in March of 2007. It was South by Southwest. Tim gave a talk at South by Southwest, which blew the book into the stratosphere. It was the spark that ignited the engine that blew this book into the stratosphere. Now, what I want to argue in this article is that this was actually a very unlikely crowd to be receptive to the message Tim had to share with them. And a lot of this has to do with the context of that time. So I just said that South by Southwest was in 2007. Let's look at what else was happening in tech culture around this period.

So in 2004, just three years earlier, Google had its $23 billion IPO. 2006, that's just the year before. Facebook opened beyond university students and quickly got its first 100 million followers. That same year, Twitter went live. So we have that happening at the same time. time earlier the same year, we also had the iPhone launched. Steve Jobs stood on that stage in the Macedonia Convention Center in San Francisco and introduced iPhone.

So this was a period of huge enthusiasm for the tech industry. There was a lot going on. There was a lot of changes going on. And the culture emerging during this period was definitely one of moving fast, breaking stuff, hustling, getting things done, not sleeping. This was a period of we are changing the world, the culture is changing, and you're going to get there by working very hard. I mentioned in that article how during this period I was at MIT and there was a notion going around at MIT at that time of hard core culture. So it was a term that you would hear around MIT a lot at the time where they would

say, I'm hardcore. And that was, that meant I'm staying up late. I'm doing triple major. So this was the context in which Tim Ferriss took to stage at a tech conference. So everything was about working hard, staying up, moving fast, hustling, and by doing so changing the world, he stood up on a stage and basically told people work less. What you were doing is, is unsustainable. And you can look at the actual terminology. He talked about checking email like a rat with a cocaine pellet dispenser, sin receive, send receive. He talked about just flatly the unsustainability of what's happening. Is your business scalable? He said, is your career scalable? And most important, is your lifestyle scalable? These are big

big claims to make to a crowd that was celebrating working very hard. He was saying what you're doing is not working. So this was incredibly countercultural. You could imagine that this would lead to a backlash. The audience would say, what are you talking about? We are doing what is cool. We are doing what the culture is saying. We are building these companies.

They're producing billion-dollar IPOs. But it's not what happened. instead the talk was a huge hit. So I went back and talked to Tim about this, but he went in there saying, I don't know what's going to happen. If it goes good, good, if it doesn't, it doesn't. Instead, the temporary room they found the slot of in because he was a last minute replacement was overfilled capacity. Almost immediately, he began to hear from participants who were saying, I've changed major things about how I work to embrace your ideas. A bunch of the

the tech bloggers, influential tech bloggers who were there by South by Southwest began interviewing Tim. This is what really sparked the growth of his book. These interviews with influential tech bloggers spread the idea throughout Silicon Valley. He quickly expanded to take over that market segment with his book. Once he had that imprimterer of Silicon Valley is all about this new guru, that is what gave it the foundation to expand to the culture much wider, to much wider audiences and made that book a perennial bestseller. It was on the New York Times bestseller list more or less continually, with some exceptions for seven years to follow after that. So it was unlikely that speech would do well, but it did.

So here's the, I'm going to highlight this in the article, but here's the big observation about that. Here I just tell them with my pen. Okay. In retrospect, an overflow crowd of tech sector enthusiast embracing Ferris's message was a warning shot, an early indication that the mode of work emerging in a hyper-connected, always-on, hustling modern office had flaws. It was a big deal, I think, that that audience received his talks about. What it told us is, there's a problem. There's a problem with the way we work.

If even these people at the core of overwork celebration are embracing Ferris, there's something beginning to spread. There is a cancer in our work. that we have to be careful about. So I think that was really telling. Now, the interesting thing that happened is the book, of course, did very well. It sold a lot of copies. I found a reference where it was featured on the NBC hit show, The Office, where the deris, what's his name, Daryl, the Daryl Philbin character said at some point, four-hour work

week, so he was referencing it. So the book became very popular. But the underlying cultural message, the way we're working is not working. It is not sustainable. This idea that we should be so locked into this frantic scrambling from the age of 22 till the age of 65 doesn't work. We could completely rethink the role work plays in a deeper, more fulfilling life. That radical part of the message was rather quickly stripped out of the cultural reception of Ferris's book. And I get into this. into the article, but I said there's really two reasons why I think this happened. One, Ferris was quickly re-associated with hacks, optimizing productivity. And this book quickly became categorized in the minds of people who encountered it or heard about it as a book about extreme productivity hackery. Now, I don't want to imply that this is an unfair assessment of Ferris's work because Ferris

himself, as he told me when I interviewed him, was interested in hacks. He doesn't use that terminology. He talks about minimal viable inputs to get a desired output, but he was really interested in that. And after the four-hour work week, he went on to write books like the four-hour body, which was much more specifically targeting optimization and hacks. You want to get bigger arm muscles in a minimal amount of time. Do this exercise, eat this food. So he is really interested in hacks. The intro to his podcast is all about optimizing performance. So he quickly got recategorized. as a productivity hack optimization type guy. That's different than a challenging the very nature of work type guy, rethinking what is a sustainable life in a world of digital knowledge work. That idea got pushed aside, and he was seen as the guy doing hacks. As I point out in the article, by the time Daryl Philbin on the NBC show, The Office, held up to four-hour work week and said four-hour work week. At that point, that plot in the office was actually

Darrell trying to do more work so he could get a promotion to a more grueling manager job. So by the time we got to 2011, what we would say is the peak of the influence of the four-hour work week, the way it showed up on that NBC show was actually in direct contradiction to the underlying message of the book, which is to work less, that changed the role of work in your life, to make it smaller, more autonomous, something you control. something you deploy towards making your life happier. By the time we get to 2011, it's, oh, this book must be about how I get more done. The exact opposite.

The exact opposite about what the book is about. I thought that was a very telling example. The other explanation I give for why I think we lost the main message is that we weren't ready for it. We weren't ready for it at that time. So if we think about 2007, 2008, what's going on right then? We are in that pre-great recession moment when everybody's making money, that you buy mortgages, you buy stocks, whatever you're doing would seem to any type of activity seemed to be alchemizing into money.

Everyone had cash. This was this bubble period before the big recessionary crash. That was not a period where people were really open to a message. of work less. Activity was generating money. Everyone was doing well. No one wanted to hear it then. And then we had the big crash.

Well, after you have a huge crash and everyone's scrambling just to find a job just to make employment, they also did not want to be rethinking works. That timing was such that our culture wasn't ready for it. So Ferris got recategorized as the hack optimization guy, his underlying subversive message about rethinking the role of work, got ignored.

So that brings me to why I wrote the article for the New Yorker, which is I had just spent months writing this column for the magazine. It was all about the impacts of the pandemic on the world of work and how we think about work. And I was categorizing the various ways that people were rethinking the role of work in their lives and trying to make it something that supported a life well-lived, the deep life, not just something you do for the sake of doing it. In that context, you would assume that Ferris's book would be a major text. It sold millions of copies.

It gets at exactly that point. but it was never brought up in the discussions that I was involved in. And I think that is why. Because by the time we get to 2021, 2021, Ferris' subversive message had been largely eliminated from the cultural understanding of his book. So I want to bring it back now and just make this point, give credit where credit is due.

The underlying point to Ferris had that using new technologies, the internet, automation, etc., that you can find a way to make, make a good living with work that happens on your terms in well south of a typical 40-hour work week, that you do not have to work for 40 years and then retire. You can actually go back and forth between adventures and retirement and then make it enough money to survive. This type of subversive countercultural message is radical. And he was making a radical point.

It got forgotten, but I want to bring it back. He was of that generation probably the first at this argument that a lot of people. are making now, that maybe the role of work in our lives can be something different than it actually is. That article in some sense was a hat tip to Tim because I thought he was being unfairly ignored. He actually was way ahead of the game on a problem that everyone now seems like now agrees exist. I mean, did you read it, Jesse, four-hour work week? Was this something you came across at the time? Or is this something that, do you know Tim through that book or do you Tim through like the podcast or a more recent incarnation. I'm always curious now that I read this

article how various people encounter him. I knew about him before the podcast. I think I read some of the book. He had read some of it. I read some of the book before the podcast. But then I started listening to his podcast like pretty early on. Yeah. Right. So I think that's, there's a lot of people now who know him primarily through the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Because I remember, I mean, so the four work week was a phenomenon at the time. But again, I think the pivot towards hacks and optimizations and four hour body and four hour chef really, I don't know what you would call it, but kind of corralled his audience into a big stream of people, but put up pretty thick walls on either side of that audience. And it sort of insulated him from the more

mainstream awareness. My memory of four hour work week was Remeet Sethi, who was a friend of mine, he was a friend of Tim, so it's a sort of a shared connection. I remember Rameet calling me in 2007 and saying, I have this friend Tim and he wrote this book and you have to read it. I remember that. I remember getting on audio. And for some back then, they weren't really well synced. Audio books and print books.

They weren't really well synced. So I was able to get the book early just because it was available earlier on audio than it was on print. And I remember listening to that near Harvard Square where I lived at the, time. And I remember the time it was like a lightning bolt. And a lot of people forgotten that reaction. It was like a lightning bolt because of this subversive idea that you could craft this incredibly alternative lifestyle in which you're on the road adventuring and through aggressive use of automation and tools. You sort of do a little bit of work, but it generates enough money

that you can live in Buenos Aires where the dollar is strong and I'll be fine. It was like an incredibly countercultural subversive book. I remember at the time a lot of people had that same reaction. But again, then it's just a, like, we should be talking about it today. And all of these think piece articles about we work too much and we have to rethink the office and get remote and cut down on our number of days. Like all of these articles should be thinking about the four hour work week, but they don't. So there you go, Tim. Your book should be considered more. All right.

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Good to do it. Yeah, you can make yourself feel better. Literally birds fall out of the sky dead from noxious fume inhalation. When Jesse drives through Tacoma Park, the birds just fall and die from the, fall dead from the,

the trees. The Tacoma Parthians clutch their pearls and charge up their Teslas. But this is a great idea because again, my wife and I talk about this all the time. Hey, what can we do? And we want to get beyond just small things. This gives you a way.

RIN gives you a way of actually doing quantitative measurable difference. So it's going to take all of us to end the climate crisis, but mainly it's going to take Jesse fixing his muffler. Do your part today by signing up for RIN go to Wren.co slash deep to sign up and they'll plant 10 extra trees in your name. That's WR-E-N dot C-O-Slas deep. Start making a difference.

All right, Jesse, well, why don't we start answering some questions? So our, I should say, by the way, not to give you too much of an insider look inside of the studio, but I have this habit of checking our recording and progress and seeing the time. But we now, I no longer can do that because we have, we have made one of the most exciting investments in the history of the Deep Questions podcast show, which is this supercharged boom arm that attaches to our podcasting table that is attached on the other end to our iMac. And now we can pick up this entire iMac and move it freely through space.

And so it's pulled over for Jesse to see it. but that means now I have no idea what's going on. It's probably for the better that I can't, I can't see what's happening on our screen there. Anyway, it's exciting. It's exciting to have the, we can move the screen all around. All right,

let's do some questions. First question comes from Amy. It's a bit of a long one because I want to set the context. I think the context for this question is important. So Amy's short version of the question is how can I tell if it's time for a career change or if I'm just lacking in discipline and focus? Right. Now, here is the background.

I received my BFA and graphic design six years ago. I thought I'd be able to buckle down and improve my skills after graduation, but despite my best intentions, that just hasn't happened. As expected, my mediocre skills have led to a mediocre career. I work in the advertising department of a small, daily, digital publication, and occasionally get to design ads, but they aren't very high quality. for some time now, I've been wondering if the problem is my struggle to make time for and actually do deep work, or if the issue is that I just don't care enough about graphic design to put in this effort.

I find graphic design to be interesting, and I do get some sense of satisfaction when to make a successful design, but I wouldn't exactly say that I love graphic design. I find a lot of subjects to be interesting and could see myself being happy in some other field. All right, Amy, it's a good question. because it brings up a common issue that I want to make sure that we are clearly addressing. My short-term prescription for you is you need 100 ccs of so good they can't ignore you, injected fast. That 2012 book of mind is probably exactly what you need to be reading right now

because I am seeing danger words in your question. Words like satisfaction, happy, interesting, when talking about your job and whether you should use another job. That is a trap. Those are vague emotive terms. They will lead you to start to make career decisions based on emotions in the moment. You'll begin focusing more on the emotional momentary burst you'll get just by making a change just for doing something different, these sort of placebo short-lived effects.

is not a good way to actually craft a sustainable and meaningful career. The focus, again, on vague notions of like, do I like something else better? What's this job offering me? Would another job make me happier? You are going to get lost in the weeds fast if you take that approach. So for someone who's in your position, so it's not like there's a clear value-driven thing that you've been committed to, like, this is what you should be doing. You're a very fast runner. You're a professional athlete. You're a musician. For someone who's not in that situation, you just you have a particular skill. to train for and that's what you happen to be doing your work, I'm going to recommend lifestyle centric career planning. Now is the time to get that crystal clear image of what you want your life

to be like five, 10, 15 years from this current point. You want these visions to be really detailed. It's not just work. It's where you live, what type of house you live in, who else is there, how you're spending your time, what does it look like around you? Are you in a crowded coffee shop, in a city with the energy of that city pulsing around you, or are you instead on a porch or overlooking a small pond on a piece of property and it's sunny out and you have the picnic tables with the cafe lights over it and friends are coming over for a leisurely dinner? Like, what is it? What resonates? What is the image of your life that resonates at those timescales? And then you work backwards and say, great, what are the different professional paths

it would help me as efficiently as possible get to this vision. Almost certainly when you do this math, you will figure out that the career capital that you have already developed in your chosen field of graphic design is something you want to build on. That starting from scratch will actually slow down your path to achieving the lifestyles you're working for. So then what you're going to end up with is a specific plan. Oh, I want to live in the country near a small town but on property and have a creek can be connected to the community in my town and they come over and we have meals at their

cafe lights. Great. How can we use the capital you already have, skill you already have in graphic design to build towards that as quickly as possible? And then you figure something out. You start to get specific and you figure it out. You say, oh, I got to whatever, build this specialty, move over to freelance or consulting work. Here's the rate I could expect if I could get to the skill level. At that rate, I could do eight months a year of consulting and afford to live in this place that's pretty cheap because it's not near a big city, but there's this cool town I found and I want to go wherever is Yellow Springs, Ohio or something like this. And that's where I'm going to go and there's some property there cheap and we can fix up the house over time.

And suddenly you have specificity. You have specificity for what to do with your job and you have specificity about why. Getting to X, Y, and Z gets me to this image over here. And I'll tell you what, Amy, once you have that specificity, motivation to do work is easy. to find. Because now you are not just working because you need a job and you're sitting there with a passion mindset of, I don't know, maybe another job would make me happier. Instead, you have a crystal clear vision that you can see, touch, and taste, and you really want it and you know what you need to do to get there. That is motivation. And then you're going to find yourself making progress. Now, again, when you go through this exercise, maybe graphic design won't be on the most appealing,

an efficient path to what you want to do. That's possible. But what I want here is specificity. This is what I want. Here's the things I believe will get me there. I know what I'm trying to do. This is a tractable plan and that's what you're executing. Plans leading to something that you want. Plans you trust that are going to get you to this thing you want are plans that you will find motivation to achieve. Have you come across a lot of people that have mapped out a plan for themselves and then kind of achieved it and then realized it's not exactly what they wanted and they have to iterate. Yeah, but they're in a good position because they're doing planning-based thinking.

Yeah. Yeah. People iterate all the time too, right? Like think about myself. I've done lifestyle-centric career planning. I did a lot of this planning in my 20s and I have largely achieved that vision. I really like it. but now I'm there.

So now I have to do it again. And be like, okay, so when I'm thinking 45, 55, you know, 60, where do I want to be at those places? There was no reason for me to think that far ahead when I was in my 20s. I just wanted to get my 30s and where I wanted the right place to be. Now I'm thinking ahead and I do an iteration, an iteration on the thinking. And so the next big changes that are happening are going to be coming from this new iteration of thinking. So yeah, I think don't worry. I think some people worry.

what if I get it wrong? The thing that's wrong is not working from a plan. That's what's wrong. If you're working from a plan, then your energy is targeted towards something. You get motivation. You get meaning, you get satisfaction.

You're almost certainly going to get more out of your life than if you had it planned. And then you get used to how to do it. And so it's probably the people who iterate end up in the coolest places. If they do this iteration, then that iteration is iteration four is when they end up, you know, on the houseboat in Salisolito, working on whatever it is, art, writing their genre fiction novels.

Like, you end up in the coolest places after iteration three or four, but you can't get there until you do iteration one. I'm a big believer. Also, it's fun. Lifestyle is because you have all these possibilities. Yeah. You sort of think things through. I mean, I'm pretty close now to the image I put together in my 20s. Like just thinking about the house and the type of town I lived in and the type of work and the writing and the proximity to family.

connection to community, like a lot of things, you know, I got there. But that vision influenced a lot of decisions I had to make along the way. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in that. And I think it's going to suit Amy well. Right now I think people are ready for it too. Because the pandemic shook a lot of people. And by a lot, I mean, in particular, these type of people, you're like college educated and a generic knowledge worker job shook a lot of people in that situation up. And like, well, wait, what am I really doing here? All right, we have another question here. This one comes from Sam.

Sam says, does having occasional productivity leaks mean that there might be an undiscovered system that might work even better than what you're doing? So productivity leaks. What Sam means by this is some things get forgotten or you fall off the system for a little bit. And in his elaboration, he makes clear he wants to know, is this a problem? And he was struggling. He went through some hard periods with time. block planning. So that was his particular motivation for this question. So is like, is there things better? Does that mean time block planning is not the right system for me? So Sam, I would say,

usually the answer here would be no. So unless your work is very repeatable and rigidly defined, I mean, you just do one thing and you do it in the same way every time, you're never going to have a consistent, perfect match with your productivity systems. There'll be periods in which, let's say, things are missed, there'll be periods where you fall off of the system for a while. So maybe you get crushed to all of a sudden with some unexpected, big, urgent work, or there's a family emergency, or you get sick. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can happen that are going to knock you off of some of your productivity systems. None of that's a problem. None of that, I think, is a sign that your productivity system is somehow wrong. That's to be expected. Again, unless you're

super rigid. I write one book every two years. And all that. All I do is I write every morning. If you're super rigid, then maybe you worry about. But otherwise, there will be unforeseen circumstances and events in your work when your systems won't fully rise to the challenge. So what you are supposed to do in that situation is recover and regroup when you next get a chance. So you're crushed by this emergency that happens at work. You fall off of your systems. The emergency concludes you take a slow half day in the morning to get back on.

track. Let me clear out things, get my new weekly plan, get my task boards up and running, or whatever it is that you're using, get back to doing my time block planning. You recover and you regroup the next time you are able to come up for air. A corollary of that is don't beat yourself up during the hard time. Oh my God, why am I not time blocking? Oh my God, why am I not time blocking today? What about tomorrow? Hey, when you're in the emergency, when you're in the hard period, when you're in the unusual circumstances, just you do what you need to do. The advantages of these systems aggregate over long periods of time, it's not a chain that if you break it, you lose everything. You recover and regroup.

Now, when you do that regrouping, sure, that's a time when you can ask is there are tweaks that need to be made. You might look at your overall system and say, this little piece of it here, I'm consistently not coming back to that or that's not really helping, so let me get rid of that. Or, you know, here's why I'm falling off my time block plans. Now that I have time to recover and regroup, I see what I'm doing is I'm overblocking. I'm building these impossible plans, so the slightest issue makes them fall apart, and it's so dispiriting that I don't even bother blocking anymore when things get even a little bit hard,

so I need to be looser in my blocking, or I need to automate more so that my schedule is easier to handle. So when you recover and regroup, you might tweak. Now, what are the signs that your system is truly broken? You might need to really rethink how you do your work. If you stop using it all together for long periods of time that persist past acute circumstances, that is a warning sign. So if you just don't go back to your system at all, even though you're not in some sort of emergency, you're not crushed by a workload, there's not some unusual things happening, you just find yourself not using it months at a time. Now you might need to rethink what you're doing. Similarly, if you're using it, but it feels completely ritualistic and arbitrary, like the

equivalent of doing prayer beads and setting up crystals in your office. Like, I don't know, I have these lists that I write things on. I have to color code them and I move things over this thing. I'm just kind of doing it rotely. It's not really even impacting how I work. That's another sign you need to change your system. So there are signs of your system is truly broken. But if you just have temporary leaks, that's just normal. And that means you have a normal job. All right. There's some good written questions. Let's do a call. Let's see what we got. Qude up here, Jesse, do we have any calls queued up in our...

Yep, we do. We got a call about suggestions for sabbatical. Excellent. Hi, Cal. This is Monica Cress. I'm the chair of physics and astronomy at San Jose State. Well, you saved me from Facebook a few years ago through the digital detox,

and now I'm hoping you can help me with this one. After five years as department chair, I'm finally going back to faculty. I have a sabbatical which goes from July to December, and I have a project scoped out, but I'm not beholden to anyone but myself. This is in stark contrast to the past five years of non-stop contact switching,

where I put everyone else's needs ahead of my own. I'm really burned out right now, and I fear that my sabbatical time will slip away and I'll have nothing to show for it. The whole notion of having time to work on my own career is totally bizarre. A trip to the moon seems easier to plan for at this point. can you give me some suggestions as to how I might be able to scope out hourly, daily, weekly, monthly goals?

My sabbatical project involves learning how to use tools for data analytics. Thanks a lot for your help. Well, Monica, first of all, I am very happy for you that your period as department chair is over. This is obviously vital service that any professor needs to eventually do for their department. but man is it demanding, man is it a pain? I don't think non-professors understand the extent to which becoming department chair is this jarring, life-disrupting obligation. It also, by the way, personifies what's oddly schizophrenic about, I don't know this to right word,

but oddly whatever at odds with itself about academia, because you have this job where primarily they want you to think and produce original research. So it's a very cognitive job. But then every once in a while, they say, oh, by the way, we want you to be an incredibly busy executive. Like, we don't do this to novelists. We don't go to, you know, Dave Eggers, like, we've really been enjoying the novels you've been writing. Here's what we think. The next four years, we want you to run the HR department at the publishing house. And then you can go back to writing your novels, right? We'd be like, what crime did I commit? We don't. don't go to Anne Lamott. We really love this last book, but now we need to put you in charge

of the marketing department and you have to organize Zoom meetings and make sure budgets are set. It would be such a jarring whiplash change, but in academia, we have to do that. So people who aren't professors don't realize this. The other thing people out of academia often get wrong about department chairs is, I think in popular culture, it is often portrayed as, you know, as an accomplishment. You know, so we see this a lot in movies or TV shows. This person's not just a professor at UCLA. They're the chair of the department.

So the sense is like, oh, that must mean that you're like exceptionally good in your field. And what people, what Monica knows and I know, but people outside of academia don't necessarily know, is department chair is a necessary but dreaded chore that rotates among the fold professors in the department. it's not I mean it's an honorific in the sense that you have to be a reasonable person I mean if people hate you they don't want you to be chair because the whole thing will fall apart but it's not a professional accomplishment in the sense of because I did super good research I get to be chair so I always I always get a chuckle and Monica you probably do too when you see that I think Aaron Sorkin does this sometimes in his writing he'll be like so and so is the chair of the government department at Harvard so he must really know a lot about government and it's unrelated to your research. All right. That's all preamble. We're celebrating. Balloons are in the air. Confetti is firing because you're done with that. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your service. But thank God, Monica, that you're done. Here's the two things I'm going to recommend for your upcoming sabbatical. Number one, you need to disappear. You need to treat this like

you were going to the Arctic Research Station in Antarctica as far as your colleagues or peers are concerned. You are disappearing on sabbatical. Tell them you have a project you're working on that you are going to be gone. The way you make this clear is don't answer any email in less than 10 days. Just disappear. You are allowed to disappear in a sabbatical. You don't have to, but you're allowed. You need to disconnect yourself from the context switching and back and forth of the logistics and administrative details that have dominated your life for the last however many years. number two, I would argue that in 30% time, so 30% of the normal time you would spend in your job,

on your sabbatical, you can make massive progress on any research projects you choose, and that's what you should do. You should basically reduce your job to 30% time for the duration of the sabbatical. So that could mean two days out of the week. That could mean you work until late morning during the weekdays and not at all on the weekends. But that's what I want you to do.

I want you to go down to a severely part-time job where all you basically do is research and ignore people's emails and pretend like you're on that station and Antarctica. You will get plenty of progress on your research because, by the way, that's as much time as any professor ever has to spend on the research with all their other obligations. And the rest of that time, you can recharge. You need to recharge. You need to connect. back with your family and your community. You need to get back into hobbies. You need to be

sparked interest by reading books for no other reason than they're interesting in watching shows for no other reason than they seem like they're smart. This is a time for you to recharge. I am prescribing, I am prescribing that recharge period for you. All right. So three things. Yay. Two, disappear. Three, spend 30% of your time working on a project, spend the other 70% doing nothing productive at all. I should look up when my next sabbatical is, Jesse. How do you get? They're typically, I mean, at a research university,

they'll typically be every, roughly speaking, six years earns you another sabbatical. I think that's right. So you do six years, but then the sabbatical doesn't count towards the next six years. So it's like every 12 semester, that you are not on leave, you get a sabbatical.

At least I think that's how Georgetown works. So I might be close. I think I'm 10 years in. I've had one sabbatical. I'm 10 years in. And you're on track to teach again in the fall, right? I have teaching leave in the fall. Okay, so that's why I was confused.

But see, I don't know if that, not to get into weeds, because Monica's the only person in the audience right now who probably cares about these details. I don't know if that counts as a semester towards sabbatical or not. If I'm not teaching, but I'm otherwise, you know, I don't know.

I don't know. But you can use that time to do what you would have done on a sabbatical, right? I could, yeah. And so like at Georgetown, the way it works is you can do a one semester sabbatical and you do whatever you want and they pay your normal salary, everything. Or you can do a two-semester sabbatical and Georgetown will pay half your salary during that time. And so, for example, in the computer science department, it wouldn't be where you would see a one-year sabbatical would be, I'm going to go to Google to work with their such and such team to do research on such and such. And Google will pay the other half of your salary because from Google's perspective, half of a professor's salary is like roughly what they would pay for your coffee cost.

It's like nothing. It's money that they would drop and say, I don't want to bend all the way over to pick it up. Like, it's nothing to them, right? But it allows you to go for a year. So when I had my first sabbatical after six years, right after 10 year, I mean, I think we're having one of our numerous kids at that time, if I remember. But I just did the one semester. Now I'm in a position, fortunate enough position,

because writing has been kind to me financially so that I could actually take the full, take the full year or more. So good. That's something to look forward to. So Monica, good for you. Disappear. All right, so I thought, Jesse, we should do a habit tune-up segment. We've been doing these off and on.

I think people have been enjoying them. These are segments where I just take a piece of advice or a strategy from my productivity canon, things I've written about in my books or in my newsletter over the years, and just get into it a little bit, tune up or refresh people's understanding of that habit. So in today's habit tune-up, I want to talk about the corner marking method for taking book notes. So the general topic here is taking notes on the books you read. Now, before we get into the specifics of what I do,

we've got to make it clear that there are two general schools of thought among those who think about reading. Two different schools of thought about the role note-taking should play when you are reading books. Now, these are my names, but I think most people would agree with these general categories. The first is what I call the Zetelcastin. school of thought. So inspired by the Zettelcastin note-taking system, this school of thought says you

should always take notes on books you read, regardless of why you're reading them or what you're reading them for. You should take notes. You should capture that information into some sort of smart system so that it can be fuel for this external brain that is cybernetically augmenting your cogitation. So if you're a big Zetal-Castin, for example, adherent, you would be putting notes in Rome or an obsidian or in what's the other one, notion. And they would be connected with semantic links to other notes and forming this web of knowledge that you could later pull from. There's all sorts of variations of the general philosophy. Ryan Holiday, for example, copies quotes from books on the index cards. and he categorizes them in these big boxes.

And he can then go back later and find index cards by boxes to get the quotes and stories he needs for his book. So it's this whole notion of, this is fuel for your external brain, get the information into some system where it can form connections be retrievable later, but also help you generate new ideas. That's the Zettelkastin School of Thought.

The other school of thought on book note-taking is what I call the pragmatic school, which says, only take notes on a book if you have a very specific purpose for which you're using that book. Those notes should be serving that purpose. So, for example, if you think this book will be relevant for a book chapter you are currently writing, then you would take notes on that book for use in that specific book chapter. On the other hand, if you're just reading a book because it's interesting,

then there's no notes to be taken. It's better to focus on reading as much as you can and just enjoying bathing in knowledge. That's the pragmatic method. It's very focused. I am a believer in the pragmatic method. I'm not saying it's best. I'm just saying this is what I happen to do. So let me make this concrete for you.

As we talked about earlier in the show, working on a new book, a book about slow productivity. I was just working on the opening to a chapter on the principle of doing fewer things. And I wanted to tell the story of Jane Austen and Andrew Wiles. Andrew Wiles is the Princeton professor who solved Format's last theorem back in the early 1990s. And for various reasons, their stories interleave. What I vaguely remembered of them is their stories interleave in interesting ways. And they do a good job of exemplifying the power of actually reducing the number of things in your play as compared to other people in your sane circumstance. So that was a general idea.

So I got a biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomlin's biography, which is excellent, by the way. and I got a book on Firmat's Last Theorem, Simon Singh's book, Firmat's Ignigma, which tells the whole story of Andrew Wiles. It also tells the whole story of Firmat and et cetera, but it's the most comprehensive story of Andrew Wiles and his tackling of the proof. I bought those books to write these chapters. One of them I already owned, but the other one I bought. And I went through and I took notes on those books,

specifically aimed at what I knew I was going to read. Then a couple days later, I went through those notes, and I used it to actually help. my reading. So that's an example of pragmatic note taking. How do I take those notes in this circumstance? Well, this is where I use the before mentioned corner marking method, which is a method for taking notes that focuses on minimizing friction as quickly as possible. How can you get the information you need at the fastest possible speed? Because that is the mindset I'm off and in when I'm book writing, because there's a lot of books I need to get through.

So I thought what I would do here is load up our magic tellistrator. So again, if you're listening, you can find this video at at YouTube.com slash Calnewport Media. So Jesse has loaded up here, just a sample page from a book. This is a page from our friend Greg McEwen's book, Effortless. And I'm just going to use the marking tools to actually show you what my marks look like. All right, so over here on the right, we see a sample page.

if there's something in this page that I think is relevant, I put a slash in the corner. So imagine that slash I just drew as in the corner of the page. Why in the corner? Because when you're flipping through the book, you can quickly identify which pages have those slashes. It's right there in the upper right corner or the upper left corner. So you can very quickly identify where you have information. All right. And then what I do on the actual page is very simple.

When I find something that's relevant, I'll do one of two things. I'll either bracket. So I'll bracket off a paragraph. This I'll try to. So for those who are watching online, watch me struggle with the pin. So again, I'm just bracketing on the outside

a paragraph that I think is relevant. I'm not writing commentary about it. I'm not writing down why I think it's important. I'm not putting a lot of notes down. I trust my brain. Then when it sees that bracketed paragraph later, it'll know why. The other thing I'll do is underlying.

So like here I'm underlying if there's like a name or something that seems important, or a sentence I particularly like, or it's a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. I don't want to bracket a whole line. When I just get the sentence, I'll underline it. That's really about it. Now, there's two other exceptional things I will do with corner marking.

Since I know why I'm taking notes, I know why I'm taking the notes, if there is a passage that I think is just a home run, perfect type of thing I'm looking for. It's not background, not an example, but like this is what I'm looking for. I'll put a star. And for those watching at home, we'll see that I drew a perfectly symmetrical star there and are impressed by my graphic design skills. And then I'll often then star to corner.

So now when I'm flipping through, if I see a star in the corner, then I say, oh, that is, that's the page with the really good stuff. So I can get to that really quickly. And the only other thing I'll sometimes do in corner marking is occasionally, I'll be looking at an argument I think is important that I want to remember. Often arguments and books will be in multiple parts. It'll say, here are the three reasons why, you know, whatever, this method doesn't work. And so in that case, I'll actually draw numbers next to those reasons where they show up. So then I can very quickly know that all these things I've numbered are part of the same argument.

So we have a one somewhere and a two somewhere else, et cetera. Okay, that's it. So it's dead simple with no commentary, nothing copying to another system, no no cards going into a box. Now, I can tell you from experience. I'm on my eighth book now. Your brain remembers things. So if you flip through these things and you see underlying passages, you see bracketed passages,

you see numbered pieces of arguments, your brain is really good to be like, oh, that's really interesting. How can we use that? How is that relevant? And it figures it out, right? You don't have to treat your future brain like it's going to somehow be significantly impaired and need to be helped along a lot. If you're writing a chapter about doing fewer things and you come to a bracketed off paragraph

in a Jane Austen biography about the way that her sister Cassandra and her mother were helping her take on, taking chores off her plate after they moved to Chalton House in the early 19th century. You know why that's relevant. You don't have to write a note to yourself about it.

So it's a very low-friction approach, but it works very well. It's like over two days, I read the Austin book, I marked it up. Then a couple days later I was writing, it took me about five minutes to go through every cornermark page and skim the bracketed and underlying line. So in five minutes, I have queued up in my brain, everything relevant about Jane Austen,

and it's right there in my working memory, and I can pull the right lines I need for the thing I'm writing. In the moment, the system works really well. The overhead is minimal. I have relied on it for a long time. The only other cool thing I'll say about this system is that if you mark up a book for one project, and I know this from experience, and you come back to that book many years later, probably what you marked is still the most relevant stuff for whatever you're working on.

It's the stuff that's interesting to you and the type of things you normally work on. So I will often go back to already marked books and go through and say, this is all the cool stuff I need anyways. It'll be relevant to another project I do. Now, something people are worried about is defacing books. I want you to get over that. All right. Books are incredibly efficient but rich compressed collections of knowledge. The whole point, and I'm talking nonfiction here, the whole point is to make use of that knowledge, to make functional the knowledge in that book. So adding your markings is part of you decompressing, extracting, and putting into use all of the knowledge captured in this codex. Now, what if you mark up a book for one reason, and now you have a

completely different reason why you need the book, and these marks are no longer relevant? Here's my suggestion, get ready to clutch your pearls, buy another copy of the book. We treat books too preciously. You're not buying a car here. Costs 15 bucks. You should buy more books. I have already bought, just to be, let's make this concrete, for this one chapter I'm riding in slow productivity. I have already bought seven books as part of my research for this. And I am three out of six. So about halfway through. So I'll probably end up buying, I don't know, 10 books, maybe an even dozen. That's $300 or $400 well spent if I get 10,000 really good words out of it.

I mean, well, for the price of lunch at Panera, you could have the polished compressed wisdom of a scholar who spent 20 years working on a topic. I mean, it's the best bargain in town. We should buy more books. And obviously as an author, I have a bias here. But we should buy books, mark up books, buy other copies of books. I'll buy second copies of books. I'll have multiple copies in different formats of books. I'll own it, get rid of it, buy another copy.

We should have books being a much richer part of our life, a much more common part of our life. We shouldn't worry so much about having too much books or keeping the books really precious. They're meant to be used, so mark them up. So do you do it's all hardcover, hard copy books? Whatever. I mean, so you mean versus Kindle or hard copy?

versus paperback. Versus Kindle. I'll usually, I prefer to have the physical because the corner marking method is very efficient. Yeah. I'll do Kindle. How would you go about, you just look at your note, your bookmarks? Yeah, so in Kindle, you can highlight using your finger. And then you can export.

So when you're done highlighting a book, you can export. And it will actually send to the email address that's associated with your Kindle account, a PDF that has everything you highlight. put actually pretty nicely formatted. Right? So it's actually kind of nice, right? A couple problems with it though. The 25% or something?

Well, so some books, some books will correlate Kindle locations with page numbers and an actual printed edition. Some don't. So I do not like, and my copy editors and fact checkers do not like when I'm trying to cite

something from a book and all you have is a Kindle location. Right? So I think that's problem number one. Some books don't have this problem. Some do. I mean, there's ways around it. Not, again, to give away secrets of the trade,

but I know, like, New Yorker fact checkers, often because they don't want to buy every book you used. And I used to send them photos of the page or whatever. They use Google books often. So you can use Google books and search for the particular line, and you basically will get a image of the page. You can see, like, oh, this is exactly the way the line looked in the books. There's a way you can go from, let's say, Kindle highlighted quotes and actually get the page number.

But it's nice just to have it. Two, I use my library like a library, you know. So I like to be able to pull things off. I do this all the time. I pull things off the shelf and use it for different projects. That's harder with Kindle. I mean, I know a lot of people are more minimalist about books. Like, why do we drag all these books around and they just take up so much space and they're heavy?

I actually use my library like a library. I'm constantly pulling books off of it. So I like having the artifact. But I'll do Kindle, especially if I don't want to. want to wait. I'm like, oh man, I got to write this right now. And I think this book has a chapter in it I need. I'll just buy the Kindle thing so I can have it. By the way, it's not uncommon for me to then buy a hardcover paperback version of a book I had in Kindle. I'll get some notes out of it. I'll like this is useful and I'll buy the books so I have it for my library as well. Again,

I'm happy to buy a book multiple times. Do any of these books that you're reading count for your or May books? I'm not reading them. I'm not counting any of them towards the May books. Like for the, for the Austin biography, I'm turning the speed knob up and down. So I'm kind of skimming and then I slow down when things are really relevant and then I speed back up. Now, that's enough for me to have a pretty nuanced understanding, I would say, of like Austin's life and the social and economic circumstances in which she lived and the dynamics of her family. Like I now know a lot about Jane Austin, but, you know, I didn't read every detail, so I don't count it towards a May book. For the Fermat's book, I was just reading the chapters about Andrew.

So I don't count it towards the May books. But if I read every page, then I will. When you're doing book, I mean, if I'm going to read a dozen books for this chapter, I'm not going to read every line of those books. You're going to be in and out. You're going to skip chapters. You get really good at variable speed skimming. And if you do it well, you can learn a ton.

You get a lot of context pretty quickly. All right. Well, anyways, that's the habit tune up. We've got a couple more questions here. But first, let me briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. And that is ExpressVPN. If you use the internet, a lot of kids these days do, you need to have a VPN provider. The way a VPN works is instead of connecting directly from your device to some site or service,

you first connect to a VPN server. This connection is over a strongly encrypted connection. So anyone sniffing your packets doesn't know what you're saying. The VPN server then communicates with the website you want to talk to on your behalf. Since that information back to you. So now when your internet service provider is trying to figure out who are you talking to and potentially selling that data, which they do, What type of websites does Jesse go to?

What type of websites does Cal go to? They have no idea. All they see is that you have a encrypted connection to a VPN server. They have no idea what you're telling that VPN server to do. They don't have any idea who that VPN server is talking to on your behalf. So you need a VPN to keep yourself secure and to preserve your privacy. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN. I think they're the best in the business.

They have tons of servers all over the world. So wherever you are, there is probably a server nearby you can connect to. And nearby is good because that's going to be a faster connection. They also have great bandwidth. So it's very fast. You run the ExpressVPN software on any of the devices you use. It makes this seamless. You don't even realize you're going through a VPN.

You're using your device like normal. You're checking email. You're watching Netflix. But you have all of the privacy and security guarantees that VPNs can give you. So you need a VPN. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN. So secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash deep. That's XPR, E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep,

and you can get an extra three months free, but only if you go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep. I also want to talk to you about Novo which is powerfully simple business checking. Now this is relevant Jesse. I don't know if you know this,

but I'm in the process of incorporating my company, meaning that I will be able to have, among other things, a bank account in the name of the company and not just a personal bank account. And so suddenly things like Novo, are very relevant to me. The hard part is, by the way, is coming up with a name.

So if you incorporate, you have to have to have a name. I'm still leaning towards Jesse Scarecrow, Incorporated. But I haven't finalized it yet. I haven't signed the papers. But anyways, if you have a business, you have to worry about things like your business checking. This is where a company like Novo comes into play. Unlike a traditional banking model,

Novo has no minimum balances, no transaction limits, and no hidden fees. They will customize to your business to help you save time and free up cash flow. So it's really a business-oriented account. Among other things, it will give you seamless integration into Stripe, Shopify, QuickBooks Online, all the different services you probably use to run your company. Not us.

I mean, so far, we've been using, we use bags of nickels. It's probably not the best way to do it. we ship bags of nickels to our various contractors. Big bags, Jesse Stensel's dollar signs on them. They're big burlap bags. So like Mark, our soundmaster, for example, we just ship them burlap bags with dollar signs full of nickels. No more.

Once Jesse Scarecrow Incorporated is a real company, we can get a novo bank account. No more shipping large bags with dollar signs on them full of nickels to your contractors. You can actually do banking with seamless integrals. the tools like Stripe, Shopify, and QuickBooks. So sign up for Novo for free and join the community of over 150,000 fearless small businesses who found the customizable business checking solution that it buyers their courage. So sign up for free for free business checking right now at novo.c.0.co slash deep.

If you do, that's slash deep, telling them that you're a deep questions listener, you will get access to over $5,000 in perks and discounts. So go to NOVO.co slash deep to sign up for free. That's novo.com slash deep. Novo Platform Incorporated is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Middlesex Federal Savings. FAA member FDIC terms and conditions apply. What do you think is harder to say, Jesse, the NOVO.C.

or Zocdoch.com. I know you're going to say that. I'm not sure which one. If they team up, that's going to be a problem for podcasters. They somehow, if it's Zocdoc.com slash novio. For all of the arrested development fans out there,

if you remember the lawyer, Bob La Blah, Bob La Blah, and they had a law blog. It was Bob La Blah's law blog. pronunciation humor. Is there any higher form of humor? Probably not.

What's the other one? 30 Rock was the rural juror. Jenna was in a movie called the rural juror, and no one knew what it was. No one really understand what she was saying. She'd be like, the rural juror. Oh, well, that's what I would say. Zocdoc.com, NOVO.C.L.Rural Juro

was represented by Bob Blah Blah's law blog. All right, enough of that nonsense. Let's do a couple more questions, Jesse. Ooh, we got a long one today. All right, we'll do a couple more questions promptly and efficiently before calling it quits before my pseudafed wears off. We got a question here from Sam. Sam says, why use a paper notebook for time block planning instead of an app?

I'm surprised that you're a computer science professor but choose to go with pen and paper for your time block planner. I thought you would be at the forefront of advocating the full use of computing devices to maximize productivity. Why not? Well, Sam, you have a skewed definition of productivity, which I think will explain why you are confused. See, when I think about productivity, what I think about is the ratio between the time I put in and the amount of valuable output I produce, where valuable output is defined uniquely to me. And for me, it has a lot to do with high impact, important writing articles and books.

But I think about a good ratio between time invested and this high quality output produced. So there are certain productivity tools that have a huge impact on that productivity. In other words, they allow me to get a lot more out of my time. Fix schedule productivity gives me that. Underneath the covers of fixed scale of productivity, time block planning significantly increases the amount of high quality output I'm able to produce for those fixed hours. I work. Multiscale planning helps me with that because I can be focused on multiple timescales to make

sure I'm working on the right things, not spending too much time on the wrong things. These are big productivity wins because we're talking about 10 articles instead of five, three books in a five-year period instead of two. Really big increases to what you're able to produce. What you're talking about is minor efficiency gains. If I have some sort of souped up app that saves me six minutes per day versus using a paper planner because maybe it pre-fills in some block forms and I can access it on my phone in some situations,

that extra six minutes a day won't have any impact on how many articles I write this year, won't have any impact on how many books I write this year. Small efficiency gains do not typically. aggregate into significant changes in high quality output you produce. Those come from major restructuring about how you actually invest and focus your time. So I don't care too much about small efficiency gains. I mean, it doesn't mean I don't ignore them. We just talked about earlier in the episode corner market method. I like the efficiency of that because I want to get through books quickly and not break my stride. But I'm not under the delusion that squeezing out these little inefficiencies

and how you do things is going to be the key to really changing the amount of really high quality output that you produce. So I like paper. It's simple. It keeps me away from my screen. It doesn't crash. It's incredibly flexible. And I can bring it with me wherever I go, even if I'm not at a screen. And so I think it's a good tool, and that's good enough for me. So I'm not going to fall into what I call a convenience fallacy, which incorrectly believes that finding more convenience or more efficiency is a going to aggregate into significantly improvements to the amount of stuff you produce that you care about. I should, however, use this as an excuse to give a quick update on the time block planner. I have a brand new version of the time block planner already planned out. I've messed around

with what's going on with the pages. I have shrunken down the weekend pages or some other changes I've made that I think makes the planner even more useful. The biggest change is going to be the introduction of drum roll please spiral binding so you can actually lay this thing flat little insider baseball the issue with spiral binding is you can't stock something at a bookstore with spiral binding we have sales numbers on this planner everyone's binded on amazon so who cares so the the publisher has agreed that spiral binding makes sense all this is ready to go everything is locked in we don't have the new version yet why is this there is a huge printing shortage supply chain issue in this country right now. Publishers are having a very hard time

getting things printed. Smaller books are seeing their release dates being kicked left and right down the road to make room for the bigger releases just to get enough copies printed. There's a real issue with printing capacity right now in this country and the time block planner is a casualty of that. So we're ready to go. It's coming. So if you're a time block planner, keep using it. Know that the new and improved version is coming. Don't break the chain. And I will let you know just as soon as that that is ready.

So we actually did a big first printing of this, Jesse. We printed a bunch of these things. And so the idea was, okay, when this first printing wears out, that's when we'll shift to whatever upgrades we want to do. And we sold through it pretty quick. We've sold through this big first printing, tens of thousands of these things. I bought one.

Yeah. But when it came time to, to do the upgrades, we couldn't get the tooling going yet on the printer. So we've actually been having to print the old ones, we're just doing it bit by bit because we don't want to build up a big surplus. We want to

be ready as soon as we get the capacity on the printers so we can do the spiral bound. We want to throw them in. So anyways, that's coming. I will continue to improve that planner. But if you use it, know that you're among tens of thousands of people who have been. And if you don't know we're talking about, go to timeblockplanner.com.

there's a really nice video on there I filmed. It explains the whole thing. All right, let's do one more question. This one comes from Random Indian Guy. I should clarify that as how he's self-identified. This is not me. This is not me applying that label. Random Indian guy asks,

how should someone persevere through sessions of deep work? After going through about halfway through my sessions, boredom sets in and it becomes very tiring. Right? There's two possible things that can help you here. One is if you want to just get more stamina in your existing sessions, make sure that you have a clear artifact that the session is trying to produce. I talk about this in my book, Deep Work, it really helps you focus if you're producing a certain thing. It's an outline.

It's a draft of a chapter up to a certain point. It's a collection of notes and a nice format that you're going to send to your collaborators. But you have a clear artifact that you're building towards completion. when you're trying to complete something with a clear notion of this thing is done, and this is what I'm trying to get done in a session that focuses the mind and helps you actually get longer into your session. Two, ritual helps. So again, if you have rituals that you do before each session to put your mind into a deep work mindset,

then you're more likely to go farther. You have the special spot. You just use for deep work. You do a walk ahead of time. You brew the special tea. Whatever works for you, rituals can make a difference. The other point I want to make, though, is this. it's also possible that even if you do all of those things, you're going to struggle to get

through your whole sessions. If that is the case, this means your sessions are too long. Your sessions are beyond your current cognitive capacity for concentration. It would just be like if you said, I want to run 5Ks, but I only make it, you know, one and a half K before my legs give out. The right answer is you need to train more. And that would be the case here. So you can do interval training or productive meditation. These are all ideas I get into in deep work. So interval training is where you literally sit there with a watch and you're going to do deep work until this time is done.

And you make that time be a little bit of a stretch. And if you break concentration and look at your phone or a computer before that time is up, you have to restart. And you stretch yourself to hit that time. And you get that stretch because you want to hit the time. You don't want to give up with five minutes to spare. So you do stretch yourself because of the presence of the timer. You stretch yourself past where you're comfortable.

And then once you, over time, adjust to that duration and don't find it to be much of a challenge, you increase the interval length. Interval training. Do this for six weeks. You can substantially increase your capacity to concentrate. The other thing I mentioned there is productive meditation. Take a professional problem. Go for a walk. Try to make progress on the problem in your head as you walk.

when you notice your attention wander, which it will do, just bring it back to the problem. When it wanders, bring it back. You have a natural endpoint to this when the walk is done. But you don't want to stop early. So for that whole duration of the walk, you keep bringing your attention back. That too is like calisthenics for your mind. In particular, it's focusing on your working memory,

your ability to maintain complex elements of your working memory and work with them. configuration and combinations and grow off of them. Both of those things, just like doing time on the track will help your running time, will increase the amount of time you can comfortably concentrate. All right. So artifacts and rituals, this will help you have better sessions. If you still don't like what you can do, train, interval training and productive meditation

is your best. What's your ritual look for before you're writing sessions now? Well, so in my summer riding session, I'm going to be on my way home from dropping my older two boys off at the bus stop. So their bus picks them up right around 8 o'clock. The bus stops about 10 minutes from our house. So I have the walk back to start clearing my head. As soon as I get back to the house, I do my pull-up routine. It just takes five minutes, but it's just 10 normal grip, 10 reverse grip, 5 normal grip, 5 reverse grips.

six normal grip. So it's the number of pullups you need. I figured out at some point. So number of pulps you need to do to, whether that adds up to a thousand a month, or there's some number per month. So I just do that in the morning immediately after the walks. This is unrelated to whatever workout I do that day. So we talked about before I do happy hour workouts, right? Unrelated to that, just a foundation. That's less about strength than it is about you're activating your body, you're activating your muscles, you're getting the blood flowing. I go right from the pull-ups, boom, writing. The laptop is out, and I'm either at my desk or the table or I'm outside.

I mean, I'll switch locations. I go to the coffee shop after a while, but it's right, walk, pull-up, right. There we go. It was hard this morning, by the way, because I was sick. I was in Bevco and was, you know, sort of swaying with tiredness. But I just adjusted. So I was focusing more on research than writing because I was like, you know, I'm not going to write super clear this morning, but ritual is ritual, routine is routine. And so I got, I was going down, I was learning about the sort of the rise of Christian monasticism. So I'm trying to make this argument about the monastics being among like this early example of this principle that you reduced the number of things in your life to increase the value you get from the thing that you care most. And, And so I was getting into the life of St. Anthony. St. Anthony really was probably the first true monastic.

This is Egypt. This is 200 to 300 AD that period. So I was getting into that. And, you know, his life, his life story and the monastery to St. Anthony that they formed out in the mountains of the Red Sea. And how it was really the first. There's ascetics before, but they would live in the outskirts of town. It was sort of the first actual Christian monastic community where you lived apart. And anyways, just getting into it.

So I was tired, but I wanted to do my work. And so I did that. I took notes on that. And anyway, so that's my routine. So ritual matters, right? Like that is, that's going to work much better than if just at some point, like if after we podcast, I was like, I'm going to go try to write, you know, good luck. Some days I get something done, but good luck.

All right. Well, speaking of ending podcasting, we've hit the one hour 30 mark. We haven't done that recently, so I'm pretty proud of ourselves, Jesse. But we should probably wrap this up. So thank you to everyone who sent in your questions. If you like what you heard, you will like what you see at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. You'll also like what you read in my weekly newsletter, longstanding weekly newsletter. You can sign up at CalNewport.com.

We'll be back next week with a new episode and Intelden, as always. Stay deep.