Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 198: The Second Principle of Slow Productivity

Episode Date: May 30, 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/calnewportmediaUpdate on Cal’s book writing [5:11]- LISTENER CALL: How do I get information out of my inbox? [9:59]- How do I choose a masters program? (RANT alert) [15:16]- How do you know what is enough for the next step of your career? [19:47]HABIT TUNE-UP: Multi-Scale Seasonality (The second principle of slow productivity)  [34:01]RAPID FIRE CALLS:- How do I improve my evening wind down routine? [40:36]- How do you take a Deep Holiday? [42:52]- How do you organize your books? [46:12]NEWS: A novel solution to the problems of social media [51:45]Can I live a Deep Life if I decide to start a family? [57:27]Thanks to our Sponsors:Getkion.com/CalMagicspoon.com/CalZocdoc.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 198. I'm here, as always, in the Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, 198. 200's kind of sneaking up on us. Yeah, two away. Two weeks. Yeah, I didn't really think about it.

For whatever reason, working on the script for today, I was like, wow, we're almost there. I mean, I assume it's probably too late for us to plan something special. We didn't really get our act together on that. South Africa trip. We may be a little bit late for two weeks from now to be recording South Africa. Maybe though we can get you out on the sidewalk in front of the Republic restaurant here in Tacoma Park with one of those flippy signs. Yeah. You spin.

That's a good idea. Free podcast show, free podcast show. We can get a little audience together. You can have like six confused parents on the way to the playground with their toddlers, just standing around looking upset in the background. in the background in the HQ. That's going to be our 200th anniversary. I'll tell you, here's the best venue in town. I've done a lot of stuff in D.C.

I would say the best venue in town for something, if you're going to do a big live show, is a 6th and I. You know the 6th and I synagogue? No. So it's at 6th and I in D.C. It's a historic synagogue, but they have this, it's a fantastic performing space.

And all of these famous music acts have come through and comedy acts have come through. This was the old school where they would actually build rooms for the acoustics. And so the acoustics in this room, this giant synagogue room, are just perfect. And it's a cool looking room. And they do a lot of performances there. And I got a chance to perform there a couple years ago. It was the minimalist. You know those guys. Yeah. Yeah, they were in town. They were doing a tour. So they used to do these tours where they do their podcast live in different cities. And they came to D.C. And Joshua got real sick, like hospital

sick, you know, just like caught something and was, was not doing well. You know, they're huggers. That's their thing. Like, they hug everyone they meet in the audience afterwards. So, you know, you get all sorts of god awful bugs, you know. I mean, forget monkey pox. He probably had crocodile pox or something like that. So they were down a man. And Ryan's like, can you take his place? Like, just you can pretend to be Joshua for an episode. And they were doing it at six and I. So I got out my black t-shirt. Because if you're going to do the minimalist, have to be wearing a black t-shirt and we had a great show anyways i just remember um my my one night filling in for joshua fields milburn enjoying the venue how did it go it was good yeah they do it they do a

good show they have a musical act i mean they get it down to a science i'll tell you you want to grow a show you want to grow your audience you got to work and those guys work they have done multiple u.s tours where they do every state like that's how they grew the podcast at some point. They're like, we're just going to go to every single state into a performance. And they did that like twice. And then when they had that documentary that's on Netflix,

they toured movie theaters in every single state, bringing in their crowds, premiering it. And they did that before Netflix bought it. That's what built up the energy that led Netflix to bought it. So they, these guys really are minimalist in the sense that they focus on what's important. Like,

okay, we want to grow our audience. And they give it their full laser-like attention, which actually is a good lesson about minimalism. Like this is the idea for my book, Digital Minimalism. It's not about not doing things. It's not about taking away things for the sake of taking things away. It's about focusing on a small number of things that really matter,

getting the clutter out of the way that gets in your way. So actually working that hard is actually pretty minimalist for them. All right, well, anyways, we should get into the show. Two annoying PSAs I want to do real quick. One, someone pointed out the other day that the reviews of the podcast and iTunes, are really out of date. I mean, I don't really talk about it much because I find it annoying. But it's to the point now where someone who discovers our podcast might say, why are there no reviews here since February? So annoying PSA, if you're an iTunes type, if you like the show,

maybe leave a review so that it's more up to date. That is, if you like to show. If you don't like to show, I just got to notice that the review feature on iTunes is broken. And if you try to use it, you will have a virus on your computer. So keep that in mind. Other annoying PSA, if you like the show, you'll listen to it. You'll probably like the YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, full episodes, video of full episodes, which now increasingly have visual elements from drawing on tablets, etc. available on YouTube just a couple of days after it comes out. We also release standalone clips of individual segments from the show as well. So check that out, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media.

All right, let's do a quick writing update. As you know, I'm working on a new book, slow productivity. This is the first time that I have been starting a book from scratch during the era of my podcast. I'm trying to do brief updates. You get a window into the writer's life. Jesse, here's the update from last week. Last week I wrote 5,000 words focused on one particular section and one particular particular chapter, I have cut or rewritten at least 2,500 of those words.

Really? Yeah, I've been a cutting machine recently. I've been a rewriting machine. Here's what's working. Here's what I'm finding that's going on with this book is, you know, I do what I can to come with a reasonable outline for a chapter. I think this, going to this, going to this is going to make the most sense. But I can't really tell how well that plan is going to work until I do the actual writing. and so then I have to just step back and say, is this really my strongest possible swing at what I'm trying to say? The trap I'm trying to avoid is writing for the sake of writing.

This is a coherent section. It makes sense. It's written well. It's not enough. It's got to be the biggest, clearest, most impactful possible swing against the target I'm trying to hit. So I've been doing a lot of that where I write and then I have to go back and say, cut this, cut that, tighten this. we need to add better examples, putting myself into the shoes of the reader. So there has been a lot of cutting.

I think, Jesse, that actually my New Yorker experience is leading to more cutting than I'm used to because the New Yorker has really built up my muscles for deep dive research. So like what the New Yorker demands, if you're going to talk about something even briefly, it has to be the tip of an iceberg. you clearly know everything about this. And you're picking and choosing a few choice things and it comes from a place of expertise. So there's like a deep research that goes into that type of writing.

So now every little subsection of the section I'm writing is going to have this deep research behind it. And so I override everything. And then I come back and I cut this, cut that. Okay, now let me just take out these three choice paragraphs. It's turning out sometimes to find the tip of the iceberg. You have to build the whole iceberg and see the whole thing before you know what to put under the surface.

So I think it's actually leading to more cutting, but I'm hoping what it leaves behind is more confident. Yeah. So how does that go? So for instance, on Monday you wrote and then you reread that on Tuesday and then you cut some of it? Yeah.

Yeah. I did a lot of writing. Sometimes I'll cut right after. Sometimes I'll keep going. Then I'll go back. I mean, this one section is now at a good, tight 4,000 words. and as of an hour before we started recording,

I think, okay, it's the right structure. Still needs polishing. But I think I've cut it down to the next things. But now I'm stepping back and looking at where it fits into the outline of the chapter and rethinking the outline of the chapter because every time you get a piece of that outline filled in, you have a better understanding of that chapter. And I'm looking at it now and thinking,

I think I need something else on topic X or topic Y. So it's a very live process back and forth. You read and you write and you come out of it and you cut and you read and you're writing like, good, this is done? Then you step back and say, is this chapter working? Is this whole section working? So that's where I am still enjoying it, though. Do you know how many chapters the book is going to be? Probably six plus an intro.

So part one is the kind of motivating the problem and the approach. Right now I have that. the three chapters. And then part two is the philosophy of slow productivity, which I've talked about on the show, do fewer things working at a natural pace, obsessing over quality. Those are the three principles. You put those three principles together, and I think we get a much more humane approach to work, something that is much more aligned with our wiring, something that's more sustainable, something that makes work more meaningful, something that avoids a lot of the issues that we have today with work. So I'm doing one chapter for each of those principles.

But look, that 4,000 words, that's one of six sections in one chapter. Now, some of those sections are much shorter, but yeah, so those are kind of beastly chapters right now. So that's where I am. Still writing. Going to California this weekend, so I have plane rides. So does that mean more writing? More writing. Time to kill at hotels.

More writing. You know, going to Northern California, giving a talk, going to a wedding. It's going to be good. I can get some good writing done. All right, let's do some questions. I'm going to do something new. Why don't we start with a call? We usually start with written questions. Let's actually start with a call. I saw one I liked from Alex. Let's see if we can find that one lurking in there, Jesse. Yep. Here we go. Hi, Cal. My name's Alex. I listen to your podcast often. I've tried to follow your advice and get all of my important information out of my inbox and into some sort of trusted system. task list, et cetera.

Here's the problem. You do that, you make up a task list, but there's more granular information that you need for each task than you're going to put in a task list. And where that granular information lives is in the email trails that gave rise to the task.

So you're going back to the emails anyway, and you're still living out of the inbox half the time to try to figure out what to do. What's your advice on this? Really appreciate your help. Love your podcast. Thank you. Well, Alex, this is where Trello is going to do a lot of good for you. So there's three reasons why I like using Trello when it comes to organizing obligation. I like that I can have different boards for different roles so that you don't have the context

switch between different professional and personal roles. You can just be looking at obligations that has to do with what you're doing right now during your day. two, I like the categories. Categories are everything. Things I don't know what to do with. Things I'm waiting to hear back on. Things I'm going to bring up at the next staff meeting. You can have such creative categories. It really helps organize this information. But the third thing I like about Trello, and this is very relevant for your issue, is the cards can hold large amounts of information. This is how you get relevant information out of emails and into a more trusted system is you put them on the virtual. back of Trello cards. So when you click on a card in Trello, you can flip it over. And on the back of it, you can add notes. And I will just copy and paste emails, text of emails out of Gmail right onto the back of a Trello card. And if there's a thread of emails that are relevant, paste one. Put a few horizontal dashes to divide, paste another. A few horizontal dashes, divide, paste another. You don't have to format it nice. Don't waste much time.

just get it all in there. You can attach files to these cards. So people are passing back and forth drafts of the report that you're working on. Attach it to the card. That's where it lives. It lives in Trello. You can even put checklist. So maybe I'm looking at a thread of emails about a visitor coming, let's say, to campus and I'm in charge of their visit, and I've been doing a back and forth with someone about what do I need to do? What do I have to arrange for this visitor? I might extract out of that exchange list. You can do checklist on the back of cards in Trello. One, two, three, four, five. You can actually check things off and see where you are. That third benefit of Trello is a huge one. Because again, what it allows you to do is that when it comes time to work on a certain role in your

life, so your role as manager, your role as copywriter, whatever, you go to that board and all you are seen is information related to that board. And you see everything you need to do under the categories to capture where it should live into your current scheme of obligation. So the zeitgeist there is really clear and instantly graspable. And all the information you need for the various things on this board are attached right to those cards. No need to load up email. No need to see completely unrelated request. No need to induce those cognitively devastating context shifts. So that's why I'm a big fan of Trello. Other tools can do this well. I'm not sponsored by Trello. I don't have any skin in the game. I met once, I believe, the CEO of the company that bought Trello and expressed my admiration,

but there's no formal relationship there. If you have another tool that does those three things, that's fine. I mean, you can simulate this in something as simple as a Google Doc. I've seen people who do this, different docs for different roles, different bolded headings for different categories, bullet point task below it, information just indented and pasted right underneath the responding task. People certainly do this. One group that does this for sure is developers. We talked about this in a past episode. We were talking about plain text productivity. But we mentioned that the original term life hacking came from this idea. It was Danny Lewin talking about it. That developers would put everything in their life in one big EMAX file just with indentation and numbers. Everything

going on, everything they had to do. Just indent things have all the information. So you can do whatever tool. I just think Trello or Trello-like tools make that easy. But the key is Alex, out of your inbox. Get the information out of there and into a system that does not force you to have to confront everything else just to work on one particular task. All right, let's see here. Let's move on to an old-fashioned written question. This one is from Arvid. Arvid says, how do I find out what skills are rare and valuable before choosing a master's program? I am a mechanical engineering student in my bachelor year. I have a hard time deciding which master's program I am going to attend. I don't have any clear methodology for finding out what is

rare and valuable. What do you recommend? Well, Arvid, I appreciate this question. I used to come to this topic quite a bit early in the podcast, my advice about graduate school. We haven't talked about it in a while. You have given me an opportunity to return, as long-time listeners know, to one of my favorite mini rants, which is graduate school. So here's the TLDR form of my advice, Arvid. Do not start a master's program until you have to. And here's what I mean about it. In almost every situation, Here's what I mean by have to. You are working in a job you like. There is a step you want to take in this career, clearly defined,

that clearly demands that you have a master's degree to do it. So, okay, I'm doing this. I want to jump over to this position. This position will require me to have a master's degree. And not only that, but it requires the type of master's degree you're going to go get from the quality or type of program from which you're going to get it. So for example, you're in banking, you want to become a managing director. It's very clear in banking. After year three or four, you have to get your MBA in order to move to the managing director position. That is a standard path.

You know the quality of school you have to go to. They mainly go to Harvard or Stanford for these MBAs, sometimes Wharton. So that's why I'm getting my MBA. I specifically want to do this. I specifically know for sure I need to get this type of master's degree to do that. Or maybe you're in a federal government job. This often happens to get the GS whatever. And Jesse, you probably know about this better than I do. But to get from this level of that level in this particular department, you have to have this level of education. Great, I want that job. I need to get that this master's degree will satisfy it. Good. Let's go do it. That's why you go to graduate school. You do not go to graduate school because you think in general having a master's degree will open up more options.

You don't go because you say that might be an interesting thing to do and maybe vaguely this will let me go into this other career field. You have to have specificity. This degree from this program will get me this job without it. I can't get it. That's when you go to get a master's program. If you're going just because you think it might open up options, let me give you an easier way to accomplish the same thing that that will accomplish, a way to accomplish the same thing that will accomplish without you having to waste so much time. Just make a sizable philanthropic donation to that school. Because that's what you're accomplishing if you say, I'm going to go do this master's program because, you know, I like policy and maybe it'll open up some doors for me. The school welcomes your money, but you could just

cut out the middleman and give them that money without having to waste your evenings for two years. All right. So, Arvid, get a job that you like. Wait until you get to an obstacle where a specific master's degree is clearly the way past it. Didn't think about going back to school. All right. I appreciate that. Jesse, it was before your time when I used to rant more about master's degrees.

A lot of coaches need to get their masters to get head coaching jobs. Yeah. That's a real clear thing. Well, how's it work? You would be, what is the path for head coaching? of a program. Do you come out of assistant coaching? Most of the time, yeah. Right. And then what do you have to have a degree in for the jump to head?

They just, a lot of the ones that I've come across are just, you need to have your masters, not necessarily in any specific degree, but just like athletic directors like to see that you have your master's, and then that gets you the qualifications to be interviewed and stuff. So there's a lot of things like that. I think there's a lot of positions like that where, okay, now you see you need this degree. at this point to move on. And to me, that's the time that you actually do it. All right, we got another question here. This one is from Rick. Rick asked, how do you know what is enough for the next step of your career? I'm a PhD student in biomedical sciences

studying cancer biology at a well-known university in the U.S. I would be the first person, even in my extended family to get a PhD, and I'm also the first woman in my immediate family. to go to college. I'm not sure if these things factor in, but I constantly find myself either in a panic zone or in a comfort zone. It's hard for me to identify the growth zone for my career. I started my PhD after gaining years of research experience, but I think that was not really necessary now that I'm here and am looking at my classmates. It's really frustrating. How can I better identify what's enough and required? I'm clearly passionate. That's why I end up doing a lot without realizing it, but this also leads to burnout and frustration.

Well, first of all, I should apologize. It's possibly I messed up the name on this question. I'm calling this person Rick, but it's also the first woman in her family to go to college. Rick is not one of those names that's used both ways, is it? I think we probably messed up a name. So, okay, so Rick, first of all, I apologize for getting your name wrong, but let's just pretend we're doing that for anonymity reasons. Second of all, A, congratulations.

What you're doing is very hard. And that was my B was going to be, what you're doing is very hard. And the reason why it's hard, it's not just that it's hard to get a PhD. Yes, it is. But we often underestimate how much value is extracted from having informal networks of knowledge that help you structure your professional pursuits. These go a huge, long way to helping people navigate through particular professional paths, friends, family, peers who have gone through similar things, there's information that you'll get

through osmosis or information you will get explicitly about how properly to navigate this. And it is a huge advantage in moving through career paths. So you're trying to do this without those informal structures and knowledge. And I think that's exactly what you're hitting up against is you're having to guess. Well, maybe I should go do more of this. Maybe I should do research before PhD, maybe in PhD I should focus on being really good at this instead of that. You're essentially just guessing at what might be important. And because your first generation to do this, you're probably leaning towards overworking on some of these things as well. So not only are you sometimes spending time on things that aren't that important, but you might be spending a lot of time on those

things. And that's where I think your frustration is coming from. So here's what I think you need to do. You have to recreate those informal networks of knowledge. about your career. You're going to have to go out of your way to get that information in a way that the son of a prominent professor who's one of three siblings to get their PhD would not have to do. So it's not fair, but it's the reality. And let's make sure we're doing the best with the reality that you have right here. So I would recommend treating your career partially as a PhD student, partially like you're a journalist or book author writing a book about how to be a successful PhD student. And by that, I mean, you actually have to now go out there and really be doing research

about your job. It's not as hard as this might make it seem, but you need to be trying to learn from those around you what matters, what doesn't. Now, some of this can be observational, right? Passive observational. Let me look at the senior students in my group. Which ones are crushing it? Like which ones are the stars and they're getting the opportunities that they want upon graduation and try to figure out what was key. What are they doing? What's key about it? Is it publication rate? Is it the type of technique they learned? Do differential analysis if possible? I did this as a professor. I wrote a sort of well-known blog post about this where when I was a new professor, I took graduates of the same. research groups. So I tried to control for other variables. It was graduates from PhD programs who had the same advisor. And then I went to their CVs and I studied which of these went on to quickly get tenure and which ones struggled to get tenure. Either it took them a long time or maybe they left academia without getting tenure at all. I'm like, look, they're starting from the same place.

They train the same advisor at the same top school. And then I said, let me just analyze these two people these two groups rather, and see what's different between them. And in that case, what I discovered is that the cohort who got tenure easily, the main thing that differentiated them from the other was not publication count. Both groups published a lot of papers. It was citations of their five most cited papers. So the difference was, I discovered, was, oh, it's not how much you're publishing. It is publishing things that other people cite, which means you have to be

up the speed on the actual literature, what's actually gathering people's attentions, and that's where you need to be working. You've got to get in the game where people are actually working. Now, that's just for my field, but whatever, this is an example of differential analysis. You should be doing something similar within your group.

Which students in my group are getting good job offers, which aren't, what's the difference? Let me analyze them. And the answer might not be what you suspect. Like, it might have to do with productivity. It might have to do with technique. Oh, these people mastered a technique that's really hot right now. these people are working on an older technique that no one cares about or a new technique that no one

didn't pick up steam whatever you'll figure out what the difference is or they write a lot of review papers and these people didn't it so you might be doing passive observational research to try to figure out what really matters then you can also do active interrogatory research i am going to talk to people take out professor or postdoc for coffee say look i'm first generation to do this in my family. I just want to learn. What have you learned? What's important? What's not? What should I focus on? What should I not? Like you're a journalist trying to write the definitive book on how to do well in a PhD program at the school where you are in the program that you are. You are recreating these informal structures of information that really does help people navigate through career paths. Again, it's why kids are professional athletes are more likely to be professional athletes. Yes, there's genetics there, but there's also, it's a really unusual path. like what's required and what it takes, and they can learn that from their parents. Kids of professional musicians, more likely to be professional musicians. Kids of actors, more likely to be professional actors. Maybe they have some acting gene, but a big part of it is they can actually learn firsthand

how Hollywood works. So you see that again and again. So that's what I would recommend. You are doing something very hard. I want you to get as much information as possible about how that field actually works so that you're not wasting. I don't want you to waste any more of your effort. I want your effort going towards the things that really matter. All right. Well, we have a habit tune-up docked in the docket here on seasonality. I'm looking forward to that. But before we get there, let me do a quick word from the sponsors that make this show possible. I want to talk first about Keon Aminos. So you probably know that the human body is mostly made of water.

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It's true. And I don't always have an answer. And I'll say, I am embarrassed. So this is why Kian Aminos is a fundamental fitness supplement. I have been trying these out. You drink them. It's in a drink form. You can drink them every day for energy, muscle, and recovery, especially if you're doing some

pretty intense exercise. I had to take a week off exercise, Jesse, because of my cold. got back to it yesterday. Feel a lot better. Crushing the rower? Oh, the rower. Well, let's get to that in a second. I have to brag about my rowing heroics.

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you need to get Keon Aminos. You can now save 20% on monthly deliveries and 10% on one-time purchases. To do so, you have to go to getkiyon.com slash Cal. That's G-E-T-K-I-O-N dot com slash Cal to get fundamental supplement for fitness. Kian Aminos. Yeah, I should note, as long as we're talking about fitness accomplishments, as Jesse knows, I hit my goal, announced on the podcast of getting under two minutes split times for a 2,000 meter row. And then I made the mistake of going to the Concept 2 website and looking up average times for my age for 2,000 meter rows.

What is it? Well, let's just say my sub two minute split time moved me from the beginner status to novice status. Really? Yeah. So I'm out. But here's the thing. Rowers are crazy. So I, the times on concept two are from crazy rower types. So I, I was so proud of myself that I realized like, oh, that just makes me a novice. So now I have a new goal, Jesse. That is I want to get to the split times that makes me intermediate. What is that? I forgot exactly what it was, but it's like 150, 150 something. So I did 158 was my split time on my, my record breaking. novice to 2,000 meter row and I think 150 something.

And what's advanced probably like in the 140s? In the 40s. Yeah. That's what I used to do as a kid. How'd you feel after the... Wasn't too bad.

Yeah, wasn't too bad. I think the weak spot's probably not cardiovascular, just leg strength. I think that's honestly what I need to bring it down is probably just work on the leg strength. My lungs held out okay, you know.

I wasn't, I wasn't, it wasn't running out of air. I think I'm just not getting quite enough power out of the legs. But I'll keep pounding the Keonaminos until, if I get the intermediate, I'm happy. If I can be at the intermediate level for my age group on the Concept 2 website, I'll feel like my cardio fitness is in a reasonable place. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, because those guys are animals. And by the way, rowing is completely genetically weird.

You know, like the stroke of the boat I was in freshman year was a great 2,000 meter rower. So he won his category at Crash B's. So if you're a rower, you know what this means? It's an urging competition, national collegiate urging competition. And he's about my height, a little shorter, six foot skinny guy, skinny dude, and just crushes rowing. machines. Really? Yeah.

Just eat some up. Eat some up, spit some out. It's like that, man. There's so many stories about that where people just walk in,

hungover, and, you know, blast out a 620, 2,000 meters. There's just some freak of, you know, genetic nature. Well, I'll tell you this,

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advice for my advice canon and walk you through it. So today I want to talk about what I sometimes call multi-scale seasonality. So I've been reading a lot recently about what I sometimes think of as natural productivity. What I mean by that is the way as human beings we are wired to work. So clearly, through most of our history before culture could rapidly intercede with what our day-to-day lives were like, we had time for our brains and bodies to evolve, for whatever it was we had to do to survive day to day. And I'm really interested in what that is,

because it gives us some, I'm approaching this with care, but it gives us some notion of what our natural inclinations for work actually are. So actually, as we finish recording this, Jesse, my research assistant, Caleb's coming over. He's bringing a big stack of research he's been doing on my behalf on this topic. So a couple hours for now, I'm about to really increase my knowledge of how did we think about work in the Paleolithic? So one of the things, though, that seems to be clear from the work I've done so far is that our minds are not used to this idea of being pegged at all-out work relentlessly, day after day, week after week, month after month.

Our natural sense of productivity is way more rhythmic on different scales. There's intense periods and recharge periods. There's up and down periods. There's a variability to what work means. we get frazzled. We get this chronic background hum of anxiety when it's every single day, wall to wall, email, email, zoom, email, zoom, email, zoom, slack, slash, email, email, email, email, quick break, dinner, go to sleep, repeat again and again and again. We can handle intense situations. We're not meant to live in that all of the time. So one of the things I have been

recommending, one of the things I've been experimenting with is what I call multi-scale seasonality, which is about inducing more breaks into your working life at different scales, to give yourself some freedom from the sense of I'm always odd. Now, at the scale of a year, most people will take vacation. That's good. One or two weeks, maybe twice a year, people will take off work, and that's good. But what I want to recommend with multi-scale seasonality is that we replicate this at shorter timeframes.

So if possible, I would say take one day off every two months or so. So if you're in a job where you build up like a federal government job where you build up a bunch of personal days and vacation days, use one once every two months. Take that day off and don't work. Do something kind of over the top that signals to yourself that this is a self-care relaxation type of day. next again if possible in your job take one half day off every two weeks or so now this i'd recommend if you're in a knowledge work job just doing unofficially but you follow my advice you're on top of things you're organized your time block planning your multi-scale planning you get your stuff done you can set things up so that on friday you're really clocking out of work at 1.30 instead of going

all the way to five. You can figure out how to basically do that. If you're working from home, you can literally go somewhere else. If you're working in an office, you can kind of informally shut down and kind of be relaxing, working something else, and then leave the office early, a little bit earlier than normal. So you can do this a little bit unofficially. That's like a half day where I'm going to see a movie. I'm going to, you know, catch a day game at the baseball stadium. Do that every two weeks or so. Look, if you're an organized person, this will have zero impact on how much you produce. But it is a lot. It is a really good for your psychology. It's not that this adds up to a ton of time off, but psychologically,

it adds up to regular breaks from what's going on. You're never too far away from a half day that you're taking off out of the normal, where you normally be working. You're never more than a month or so away from taking a full day off and doing something else. You're never six months away from taking two weeks off for a vacation. So having breaks on multiple scales serves a really useful psychological trick. And it gets your brain into a mode if we worked and we're off. And it can really help short circuit that background hum of anxiety that happens if you feel like you're constantly pegged. Now in the big picture, I think multi-scale seasonality can be way more aggressive than that. I have a lot of thoughts about that. I think work should be way more varied than that. We'll get to that.

The whole chapter. My new book's going to be about that. But for now, this is a simple thing that you can do right away that will make a big difference to your psychology. So do you practice that? Yeah. Well, I practice more extreme versions, but again, I have a very flexible job. I have seasons that are different than other seasons. I'm in writing mode for three months now. Like, that's a big change. Yeah, I do weeks off, not weeks, days off on a very regular basis. I'll do that. Protect days way out in advance. Makes a big difference. But you still write six days a week? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, when I'm talking about days off is usually from Georgetown stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Writing's on a different type of scale. I'm working on a book for this six months. And then the next six months I'm doing nothing. So like writing goes back and forth on that scale. But I'm coming to it. This is the working at a natural pace piece of slow productivity. This is what this is starting to get to. This work should not necessarily be, I'm just pegged seven, you know, eight, nine hours a day. with a few extra checks after, just there's always stuff piled up, always stuff I'm working on anytime,

you know, I barely get away if I am, it's an issue. We're not wired for that. All right, so I want to try something, with some trepidation. Let's try something new here.

So Jesse has prepped three calls, each with a quick question. I have not heard these calls. I don't really know what they're about. So we're going to call this rapid fire. We're going to do three calls in a row after each call. I'm going to try to without having done any prep.

Give a quick answer. So we're going to do three calls with three rapid-fired answers and we'll see how that goes. Sounds good. Here we go. First call from Amy. Hey, Cal, my name's Amy. And I have a quick question about your evening wind-down routine in that I'm curious as to what it is these days. Thanks so much.

Well, Amy, I think you need to start drinking heavily at four and really bring that in for a landing right about 11 as you slip into unconsciousness. Now, my evening wind-down routine schedule shutdown confirmed. You do the shutdown ritual. You close the open loops. You look at your plan for the rest of the week and make sure that you're on track to complete it. You check that checkbox and your time block planner that says the schedule is shut down. And then what I do is I try to make a rough plan for the night ahead. I think if there's some like interesting or productive and things I can do during the evening,

I enjoy it more. Yesterday is an example. I reconfigured my closet. I like having something like that to do. I'm going to work on the yard. I'm going to reconfigure my closet. I'm going to take the kids to go see this thing. There's a special show.

We're looking forward to watching. There's something I'm going to research. So having sort of productive, interesting things to do, family-oriented, unwork oriented. So shut down hard, have a ritual, check the box, and then have a completely new, rough, but active plan for the evening. and if that fails again, start drinking at four, coming for a landing at 11. What did you do to your closet?

Oh, this is riveting stuff. I had one hanging bar and I reconfigured it to have two. So I could have the shirts up high and the pants down low. And I cleaned it out. And man, I had. Do you purge a lot? I have recently. I just went through a big purge.

It was a lot of clothes. Yeah, a lot of clothes. So now I am down to mainly just things I actually wear and they're like hung up properly in a closet. So I like it. If you don't have things to do in the evening, you fall back on the screens. Yeah. It just feels, yeah. Like you're just kind of upset and bored and sad basically.

So you got to have something to do. All right. What do we have next? All right. Next call. Here we go from Andy. Hey, Cal, Andy here. Thank you very much for your wonderful podcast.

I've been enjoying going deep and dropping that into every sentence I use. So a question for you today is quite simple. How do you take deep holiday? Thanks, Cal. Jesse, I think if I had that accent, we would have 3x more listeners. Probably. I mean, everything would sound so smart. People would be like, that's just imminently reasoned.

Well, you do have your one accent. I have a fantastic French accent. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, people don't take advice on productivity from the French. It's not, that's not, that's not there, it's not what they're known for. It's not, uh, how do I crush it? You know, how do I crush it this week?

You don't ask, you don't ask a Frenchman. How do I crush it? You be like, what's you crushing? You take the baggett, you get the wine and the work will be that next week. Deep holidays. You know, it's a good question, Andy. I used to try to completely get away from work when we'd be on vacation. And it would make me unbearable. I would get anxious and unhappy and weird. And so actually, I add intentional structure to our vacations and to become much better. Now, what I want to stay away from is email. I want to stay away from Slack and calendars and hyperactive hive mind coordination. context shifts, but what I do want to have is some sort of important project, non-urgent but important project that I'm making progress on. So typically it's going to be a writing project for me. I'm either going to be writing or I'm going to be reading or doing research for a writing

project. I also add some other structure to it. I put a little structure to the day. Like, when am I going to exercise, when I'm going to write, let's have a couple plans. I feel better with structure. I think we tell ourselves the myth that what we really want is nothing to do, being planned, anything goes, and then we will feel relaxation, but our mind doesn't actually like that. Our mind likes having things to do. So the key to a vacation is just to have a fun structure. Like, oh, I'm in this cool place and it's really scenic and I write by the lake. And then in the evening, I like do exercise over here. We have drinks on the patio. That's structure, but it's fun structure. So that's what I've learned. Holiday is not about avoiding things to do. It's about

having a structured life that's more fun and relaxing, entertaining than your structured life back home. And we do longer holidays now. So we're doing two weeks in Vermont. We'll have to figure out what to do with the show, Jesse. I'll have to record. Maybe I'll record from the, we're staying in the mountains.

I'm just going to be riding. We're living by the woods with some hiking trails. I can walk and do deep walks. Maybe I'll bring up some recording equipment to the mountains. Nice. Yeah, do some deep questions on location. I mean, ultimately my vision would be to spend the entire summer up north. I mean, the weather's perfect.

Yeah, we're doing a couple, we do a couple weeks at a time right now, but that's the, that's the plan. Yeah. The Deep Work Cottage somewhere up there. So we'll see. All right, we got one more. Rapid Fire. Who do we got? Here we go.

It's about books. Hi, Cal. My name is Brittany. I was wondering, how do you organize your books at home? What categories or subcategories? do you use? Thank you. Well, I don't organize them in any sort of logical fashion. I mean, a lot of my books, a lot of my personal library books are actually here in the HQ.

I moved them here when we converted the study into a classroom during that year of COVID when the schools were closed and we were homeschooling. So we moved them all to the, I moved them all to the HQ. So my personal library is actually here, and I don't organize them. And the only organization you'll see if you look on those shelves is I have a bunch of copies of my books, like from different languages and this and that. I mean, for whatever reason, the stuff I write about does well overseas. We've sold rights to now it's 40 different countries. It's crazy. There are versions of my books in places that would surprise you. You can get a Mongolian version of deep work that is true. Whatever. We're all over the place. So I put those all together on a shelf because I don't know what else to do with them.

But then otherwise, I mainly don't categorize books. Occasionally I'll put together a cluster of books about the same theme if I'm writing something on it. So there's like there's a cluster if you go look out at my shelf right in the other room. It's like a cluster of books on solitude from digital minimalism research days. I think I've clustered my techno-criticism books together on that shelf as well. But I don't really think it through too much. Anyways, those will move back, though. We're having the bookcases built.

We're having bookcases built in the study now that my kids are at normal school again. And so all the books will move back from the HQ to my study at home pretty soon. And I probably am not going to organize them that much. I use them so much. I just kind of know what I have and I get used to where to find them. And so I should do that. Though I know people that go the other way, like Dewey Decimal. I know people that go straight up lines.

library with their home libraries. Like it is organized by Dewey Decimal Systems and they have the card thing sticking out of the bookshelf, you know, where you can see like what numbers are passed here where you can actually like literally go and look books up. But yeah, I'm not there. I'm not there yet. Jesse, we're going to have to re-renovate this whole thing. I mean, A, it's kind of a mess. But B, when all the books go, we're really, we're going to have empty bookcases. The spare office is kind of like a garbage dump slash storage room. Yeah. I think we got,

we have some summer projects ahead of us. We're going to make this place look. Probably got to get a cleaning lady. We got to get a cleaning person. Yeah. Yeah. See how patriarchal and crude you are cleaning lady. I'm not going to guess the gender of who's going to,

he's going to clean it. So, no, I want to make this place cool. It's just time and laziness. But it was cool. If we had, I don't know,

some nice chairs to sit in, hang some art, work on the wall. Yeah. It could look good. All right, so I have a news reaction I want to get to that's actually one of the kind of more heartening things I've seen about social media in a long time. Before we do, let me just briefly mention one other sponsor that makes this show possible,

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I use Zock Doc Doc with my dentist, and we do the paperwork. You have to fill out those forms and click the little things about what conditions you have don't have. You can do that all online. I do it all through Zoc Doc. It sends me the reminders about appointments. So it really takes you from who should I see to setting up and scheduling that appointment and getting them all the information. It really does make health care much more convenient. So every month, millions of people use Zock Doc. And I am one of them. The Kedat

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I just enjoy saying Zocdoc.com. All right, I want to do a news reaction here. Brief. It's an article that a Canadian listener of the show sent me, and I thought it had something positive in it about our, what we can do and what we are doing about some of the travails of social media and our culture. So here's the article right here. It's written by Sierra Agrell, who is a politician in Toronto.

and the title of this article, Sarah Agrell, explains why she's embracing tech but not Twitter in her run for public office. There's a couple things I wanted to point out. And for those who are listening, the YouTube version of this segment actually will show you the article

as I go through it. All right, so a couple things I want to point out. Here's where the first big point is of the article. She says, last week I announced that I'm running for Toronto City Council in the Parkdale High Park. So this is someone who is running for city council in a major city. And this was the big part of the announcement.

And I'm quoting from the article here. But as a candidate and a counselor, so if elected, I will not be using Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. I deactivated my accounts this morning. This is something that is very rare to see. A political candidate announcing, I will not use social media during my campaign. I will not use social media once I'm elected. All right. So, Sarah gives two main reasons why she dislikes these services.

Let me just briefly summarize both. Number one, and I'm quoting here, it is well documented that social media has subjected people to intense vitriol and abuse with the highest levels of harassment and threats directed towards women, LGBTQ2 plus those who aren't white and people at all the intersection of these identities. So vitual and abuse. Number two, and again, quoting is these platforms contribute to much wider harm,

including radicalization, polarization, deteriorating mental health, the undermining of democratic beliefs and institutions. All right. So those are two clear issues we've talked about before. these are harassment machines and they are causing all these negative psychological impacts even beyond harassment. All right. So what do we have so far?

A politician saying I'm not going to use social media and giving too well-known but very strong reasons for why not. All right. Now we get to the part that gave me hope. I think this is very interesting. She says, this does not mean I'm not using technology. She goes on to talk about all the ways she will be using technology to connect with people. So they built out this fancy website, and I'm quoting here, that will make it easy for people to share information with their friends and neighbors on whatever platform they like.

And I hope you will share this article too. I'll be engaging directly both online and off through the site, email, text, newsletter, virtual calls, face-to-face interactions and events where we can actually talk to each of. other and not just tweet at each other. This is the thing that I like. Sierra Agrell is making the observation that is true, but that is often missed in media discussions about social media and its ills, that social media does not equal the internet. To say I'm not going to use social media is not the same as saying, I am not going to use the modern internet to connect with people,

to hear from my constituents, they hear what their issues are, to know what's going on. She is saying these tools are not the only way to do that, and in fact, they're a pretty bad way to do that. I have all of these other existing tools.

My website, email, text, newsletter, virtual calls, face-to-face interactions and events. This, I think, is one of the most important moves we can make to get around some of the ills of social media, and that is to move away from the platforms.

but they're not just move away from the platforms, but to declare with confidence and embrace with confidence digital alternatives. The internet was around before social media. The internet will be around after social media. There's plenty of innovation out there. There's plenty of novel tools out there

where the internet can help you, the democratic process and connection. So I like this. You can walk away from social media without walking away from technology. Cirok concludes by saying, I want to use technology, but in a way that builds connections. It allows people to understand what I'm trying to do and why.

All right. So there we go. There is some positive vision of our future with social media. We can embrace technology without having to be clicking on those stupid icons and doing those little 240 character threads and emojis, grown adults using emojis. This politician has it right. and I hope other people follow suit. That was a good article.

I should mention if you want to send me things interesting at calnewport.com, that's where I got this particular article. I do like the links to people send me. If you have thoughts about the show, send those to Jesse at calnewport.com. He actually reads them. Are they right? Yeah. Yeah.

Do we get comments? Yeah, some good ones. All right. All right. Well, I think we have time for one last question. This one comes from, I'm going to use the name Brian. This is not the real name. This was actually emailed instead of submitted to our normal question submission form.

So I'm hiding some details here since I'm using it publicly. All right, here's the question. I'm 38 and working abroad as a diplomat. As surprising as it sounds, I don't like my job for various reasons. Financial security issues, professional capital I built up throughout the past 15 years. I don't have the intention of changing my career. Okay, because of financial security professional capital, though he doesn't like the job,

he has no intention of changing his career. Besides my work, I study philosophy, which is my true passion. Therefore, I almost have two careers to run. The problem is my girlfriend is turning 35 and feels the urge to have a baby. I love her and do not want to break with her, but I am now at a crossroads.

As I see it, building a family would mean getting rid of my passion and finding a job back home to live with my girlfriend. Hence my question, do you have views on this, how to conciliate, well, I think he means how to figure out the tensions between deep life, family life, and a demanding career? Do you have reading recommendations to help me solve this dilemma, the dilemma of being signal and enjoying the deep life and building up a family with the risk of being overwhelmed and losing any hope for personal and professional development? Well, Brian, there's a few things in your question that can.

catches my attention. You're talking about not liking your job, but having no intention of changing it. You're using the term true passion to describe philosophy. And this idea that you share that starting a family will mean that you have no hope or any personal and professional development. So all those things that catch my intention, to me that all adds up to the conclusion that you're lost, my brother. You're lost. I think what's happening now is that you are just being batted around by concerns and thoughts and fears and emotions in the moment. There's no systematic attempt here to understand what's going on. And I'm going to say at 38 now is the time to figure this out. And the way to figure this out is to step back for a second. All right, reset time. Let's

step back for a second and figure out what we are trying to do here. Because again, You're all over the place. This is fear and randomness talking. What I'm going to recommend that you do, which I often recommend to these questions, is to do some serious lifestyle-centric career planning. What do you want your life to look like 5, 10, 15 years from now? All aspects of the life. Where you lived, you have a family.

What's your day like? What type of stuff are you doing? Are you among the pine trees reading Cinnaca? Are you in the city jumping to the art premiere? or are you throwing the ball with the kid? Like really have some of the friends coming over with the cafe lights. Like have this clear image of what the day feels like, where you are, what the rhythm of the day is.

You have to figure out what resonates. And then you have to work backwards from that to figure out how do I build towards that with my career, with my family life outside of my career, with my hobbies and interests, with my health, whatever. All the buckets, all the deep life buckets, how do I build towards that vision? that's the exercise you need to do. You need to be building towards a vision you believe in, not just reacting to fears about various things,

which may or may not be valid. Now here's something I want you to keep in mind. As you do this, as you work backwards from the vision that really resonates, it might not be obvious what is the way to get there. It might not be, oh, clearly, I leave the diplomatic corps and take up this job and that will get me there. It might be kind of complicated, especially you're figuring out intellectual pursuits like philosophy,

the career capital you actually have. Be willing and comfortable with the fact that you might get the lifestyle fixed down first before you're able to figure out the reasonable path that gets you there. And you might actually have to go out and do some research. You might have to go out there and find different people and expose yourself the different things that people have done. It might take you a year or more to really figure out what is that reasonable path. What is that reasonable path that preserves my career capital but gets me over to these other parts of my

lifestyle? You can't always force it. I've been going through a little bit of this myself. I've been trying to figure out recently in my current lifestyle image. I would say the role of writing versus other type of academic and especially academic administrative work. That's not properly in sync for me right now. but I'm also comfortable with the fact that it's tricky to figure out how to move forward to fix that. And I'm taking my time with that. I'm trying to understand different options and different types of reconfigurations of my academic career that are reasonable, that makes sense, that leverage existing

capital and set me up for interesting things in the future. I'm talking to people. I'm having conversations. I've learned a lot. But it's an example where I have a clear lifestyle. style image fixed, but I'm still doing the work of figuring out how exactly to get there. That might be where you're going to be because you have a complicated setup. That's okay.

Fix what resonates and then begin to work of figuring out what type of alterations to your career can get you there. You're going to get a lot of the benefit just by having the vision and know you're making progress towards it, even if it takes you a while to actually get there. All right. So it might not be obvious what to do. also be ready to test these assumptions. You long-time listeners know true passion is not something I believe in. As you might suspect, this idea that having a family means you lose any hope for

personal and professional development is nonsense. You're not going to be the first person in history to do that. And it can be deep and fulfilling in its own ways. And the idea that you have no intention of changing your job, again, I would take my foot off the gas on these absolutes. Let's figure out the image of the lifestyle that deeply resonates and then start the long work of figuring out how to get there, being willing to test assumptions along the way. I think you're lost right now, but the thread can be found. Deep life is possible for you, and it might be not at all what you might imagine once you actually start systematically trying to build it. All right, Brian, so thanks for that question. Thanks for everyone else who sent their questions.

Go to calnewport.com slash podcast. I haven't told you this in a while. Meoport.com slash podcast is where the instructions are on how you can do calls and how you can submit your written questions. As always, I say if you like what you heard, you will like what you see on our YouTube channel. YouTube.com slash Kalnewport Media for full video of these episodes and individual segments. I'll be back next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.