Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 20: Habit Tune-Up: Productivity System Indecision, Embracing Boredom, and Craving Depth in a Shallow Job

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

In this mini-episode, I take "calls" from listeners asking for advice about how best to tune-up their productivity and work habits in a moment of increased distraction and disruption.You can submit your own audio questions at speakpipe.com/calnewport.Here are the topics we cover: * Problems settling on a productivity system [1:01] * Figuring out which professional skill to improve [7:20] * The difference between boredom and solitude [21:12] * Craving depth in a shallow job [32:20] * Keystone habits [38:39]As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please considering subscribing or leaving a rating/review.Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm struggling in finding the, what is deep work meaning in a creative design field. I'm Cal Newport, and this is a deep question's habit tune-up mini episode. The idea behind this format is simple. I take voice questions from listeners, specifically on the topic of tuning up their professional productivity habits in this current moment where our working. working lives are unusually disrupted. Now, if you want to submit your own voice questions for the habit tune up mini episodes, you can do so at speakpipe.com slash Cal Newport.

All right, let's jump right into this week's mini episode. Our first question is about what happens when you're too interested in your productivity. Hi, Cal. My name is Reagan and I am an Episcopal priest. my question is how does one focus in on a particular productivity system? I find that often I read books such as yours and I'm immediately attracted to that particular system, but then I read another book and find another system and I spend my time bouncing around a lot and eventually it hurts the end to which I'm aiming.

So I wondered if you had any advice on how to learn new tricks and tools, but not to let it throw one off too much. Well, I think it's important to accept that no productivity system is going to save you. This was an idea that I thought was really popular, especially back in the early days of blogging, when those first really fervent online productivity communities emerged, there's this big belief. But if you could get your system just right, two things would happen. One, work would become effortless.

You would just execute your system, let your clever software configurations do what they need to do, tell you what you need to work on next. You would just crank your widgets. And without any sort of stress, without any sort of grindiness, without any sort of difficulty, you would just execute blindly what your system told you to do and the right things would get done.

And two, the other promise was, if the system is set up properly, these things that you are blindly executing is going to really generate a lot of success in your career. So there was this optimism that you could essentially offload into a system, the complexity of actually figuring out what to do and the hard work of actually doing it.

and then just blindly execute, aided by technology, aided by smart systems, and everything good would follow. I think this was followed by a period of pessimism, where we realize it's not so simple. There is no real clever way to script your Mac or any particular genius system that is going to take the burden away from working. So I think losing that mindset might help, Because as long as you're in this mindset that I'm only one system change away from this productivity nirvana, you are going to keep switching systems. Because there's this great promise that you know you haven't achieved right now, but it's so compelling that you're going to do what you need to do to try to accomplish it.

So that's a mindset shift that I think might lower that drive you feel to try something new, try something new. Now, let's get a little bit more practical. But I usually recommend the people when they're thinking about a new product. activity system is that you go through a trial period, then you go through a period where you live with it without changing it for a while, and then you go through a reevaluation period. Now, the trial period can last for two to four weeks. And the goal of the trial period is, I mean, it's a big picture you might be wanting to see like, is this failing altogether?

It's just actually a stupid idea. You know, was my plan to whatever? use carrier pigeons to communicate messages. Is that really a terrible plan I need to move on? You can figure that in the trial period. But actually, the main goal of the trial period is to look for sources of minor friction and remove them. If you go to a new system, let's see,

like I want to really get into David Allen's getting things done. Or I want to really get into Cal's capture, configure, control, approach to productivity. You want to look for these sources of friction. Like, I'm using this software to keep track of this. It just takes a little bit too long, and I find myself not doing it. or I have this shutdown routine that on paper seems like it would be really effective,

but honestly, it's a little bit too much and I'm just not doing it, right? So you're looking for sources of friction and you're sanding those down. So you're getting the system into a state where you have a good chance of actually executing it for a while. If it passes those tests, the friction seems okay. It's becoming a habit. It seems reasonable. You're not trying to send carrier pigeons. there's nothing absurd in your system.

Then you enter this second phase, this steady state phase. And I say do it for four to six months. You know, just go on with your business life. Let this system help you, but you still have to do the hard work of figuring out what to do. You still have to do the hard work of actually doing work. There's still going to be times when you feel overwhelmed. There's still going to be times when work is ambiguous. There's still going to be times when you are upset with everything on your plate.

That's fine. The system's not going to solve all those problems. Live with it for six months. Then you go into the. this third phase, which is the evaluation phase, and now you can stand back and say, huh, is this working? Is it making things easier? Like, this is where if you've come across other productivity ideas, this would be the time

to really interrogate them and think about if you want to do any other major shift. And if you do any other major change, you restart. Let's go back to the trial period where we're going to sand away friction and look for absurdities. All right, let's go to this steady state period where we just let it sink in as a habit and see what it does to our work life. and then after that you can do a reevaluation. So that's the cycle I would recommend.

And again, going through these cycles is all about having a foundational understanding that there's only so much your system can do for you. So you don't want to get too caught up. And is this exactly right? Is there some miracle system I'm missing? To be organized is better to not be, to not being organized. To control your time is better than to let your time unfold reactively. The face of productivity dragon is better than to,

run off in despair. All of that helps. All of that will make you more effective. All of that will make you less stressed. But none of it is going to make work and do not work. So once you acknowledge that, you might have a little bit more patience for letting the current system do what it's doing and make tweaks to that a bit more gradually. All right, good question. Let's move on now to a question about getting better at what you do for a living. Hi, Cal. My name is Gina. And I, I'm based in India. I'm an ardent admirer of your books, the blog, as well as the podcast. I've been a public health communications professional for over 15 years and I understand there is a need to actually augment one skills moving ahead. I was wondering if there are tools

for a person to actually identify one's skills so one can focus in augmenting and taking it forward So Gina, the way I'm going to interpret your question is that you're asking, how do you figure out what skills in your professional life are worth actually putting in the deliberate deep effort to improve? I'm hearing your question a desire to get unstuck from the plateau where you currently find yourself in your work and move forward, but you have to figure out where do I put that energy. Now, there's a very good question. Let's just talk briefly about the setup. What gets you into this situation of being stuck? Now, this is something that the late Anders Erickson used to talk about in his writing on deliberate practice theory, the best theoretical framework we have for understanding about how people get better at complex skills.

And he said when he was looking at the workplace and in particular office work, what tends to happen in that setting is that you show up and you don't really know how to do much of anything. So the work you're doing day to day was accidentally deliberate because everything was a stretch. You had to stretch yourself past where you were comfortable

because every day you were learning how to do something that you didn't know how to do using a system you've never used before, putting together a type of report that you've never written before and getting a lot of feedback, hey, this is no good, you know, so all the elements,

you need for successful deliberate practice. So what happens is when you're new to an office work job, you get better pretty fast. One year into a knowledge work job, you were much better at a bunch of skills than you were one year earlier. And you got there because even though you didn't realize it, you're doing a lot of deliberate practice. But as Erickson pointed out, what happens is, is after a few years, you're not stretching yourself anymore.

You've learned the fundamental skills and systems. that you are expected to have proficiency at. And now what you're doing is just repeating what you already know how to do. And a key idea from deliberate practice theory is that repeating what you know how to do will not make you better. You have to go or participate in activities

designed to deliberately stretch you past where you're comfortable. That's how you improve. So what happens? Well, he used the term plateau. You reach a plateau and you stop getting better. And I think this is what Gina is talking about.

I think in her current career, she feels like she's at that plateau. She's doing the same number of hours of work every day. She's working on the same things every day, but she's no longer improving because she's now just repeating on things with which she's comfortable. So what I've been recommended in my writing

for over a decade now is that if you want to get ahead in your career, you need to think about your work like an athlete or a professional musician or a professional chess player and say, what are the skills that would be valuable to get better at and then deliberately stretch yourself to get better? This is what Gina wants to do, but her question is one that is shared by many people who undertake the same challenge, which is, how do I figure out what skills to get better at?

If you're a professional athlete, this is obvious. You know, I'm a basketball player. my free throw percentage is too small. I need to work on my jump shot. I'm a chess player. I'm having trouble with end games. I need to work on end games. I'm a professional musician.

I'm having trouble with, I don't know, the speed with doing these flat pick licks on my guitar. I need to pick up that speed. But when you're working like Gina is as a public health communicator in a federal bureaucracy or something like this, not so obvious. What is your equivalent of your jump shot? So it's a really good question.

really hard question. What I typically recommend to people is that you essentially have to become a journalist, like a business journalist. Your goal is to actually set out and do original reporting to discover in my particular field, given the particular places I would like to get in my career, what are the skills that matter? Like you're going to write a Malcolm Gladwell book and you want a nice contrarian, perhaps, data-driven, interesting solution of, you know, this is what really matters for public health communicators, trying to do this in their career. So how do you actually do this investigation? You interview people, people who are in your same field and who have gotten to a place

in their career that resonates with you. And you find out from them how they did it. And what mattered? And then you say, okay, which of those things am I not very good at that I could get good at? And now you have a target for your deliberate practice. And when doing this type of interviews, and I talked about this earlier this week in the full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast, I talked about the importance when you're doing these interviews of not asking people for advice. people are very bad, unless they're professional advice givers,

they're very bad at reflecting on their own experiences and on the fly in the moment coming up with actual correct advice. What people tend to do instead is just grasp for anything they can say that sounds reasonable. But the advice you get when you ask someone for advice is often not very good advice. So don't ask them, hey, what's your advice? How did you do this? How did you get your career in this place that resonates? with me. Instead, like a journalist, like a business journalist, say, I want to hear your story.

Can you talk to me about how you progress through your career? And every time they get to a place where they do a big jump, try to find out what was it that allowed you to do that jump? What was it that you did that other people in your same situation did not do that explains why you made that jump and they did not? Particular accomplishments. Okay, what skill did you need to do that accomplishment, how did you get to the level in which you could do that accomplishment at a high level? This project, that's what broke open your career? Well, what did you have to learn first to do that project? And where did you learn it?

How did you figure out that's what you wanted to work on? So you're really trying to understand what they did. And for each of these steps of what they did, ask, what was it that enabled you to take that step? Then, like a journalist, you go back through the research you've uncovered and you try to figure out what seems important here. you are basically looking at their story and extracting advice on your own, as opposed to having them on the fly, introspect, and come up with that advice. Now, I really do mean interview. I mean, you don't have to put a microphone in their face,

but you get them on their call or you take them out for coffee. You know, I guess in an age of virus, you can talk to them outside, so you're not worried about social distancing or what have you. You can do it on Zoom, whatever. But you say, look, I want to pick your brain. I admire your career, making some changes myself, trying to get better, I want to ask you some questions. People love to talk about themselves.

And so that's what I would recommend. You find the people who resonate, you interview them like a business journalist, you ask them for their story, not for their advice, then you go over that data and you come up with your thesis about this is what mattered, and now you have your targets. This is what you can now focus on deliberately improving. Now, the reason why I think it's important to actually interview real people is that in career advancement, in my experience, if you do not actually confront the reality of what matters in your field, your mind will invent answers about what it wants to matter in your field. And the answers that comes up with will be things that might be kind of pleasant, like they're a little bit hard but not too hard, and they're kind of interesting, and just the type of things that you would love to spend your time on.

but almost certainly they're not actually going to advance you in your career. The people who jump ahead are the people who are willing to confront, this is what really matters, whether I like it or not. And now that I know what matters, I can go hardcore at that. Relentless, intense, deliberate practice, I can really get after it. And they jump ahead. You have this whole other class of people who are driven, who are motivated, who want to get ahead, who want to put an effort,

but they don't want to know what the real answer is. And they invent their own ideas about what matters. And they put a lot of energy into those ideas. And they're kind of hard, but not too hard. And they're pleasant, but not too pleasant. And they don't really get very far. And then you have that whole other third group of people that are saying, hey, look, I'm just happy to have the job.

I'm not trying to make waves here. I know what to do. I'm just going to keep doing that and keep my head low. So you got those three groups of people. If it's not that important to you right now that you get ahead, you can be in that third group. But if it is, you don't want to fall into that second group that thinks they're getting ahead, but actually aren't.

Be the group that confronts the reality of this is what actually matters. Do that work, even if you don't like it. Let me try to make this concrete. Like a common example here has to do with aspiring fiction writers. A lot of aspiring fiction writers, what they want to do is write a thousand words every day. That's the piece they like. It seems hard, but not too,

hard, it's kind of romantic. They're going to get up, they're going to go to their writing shed and they're going to write every day. Maybe they're going to participate, for example, in something like National Novel Writing Month as a way to help motivate them. And that's what they want to matter because the story that their brain wrote when it was starved of any data of how that field actually works is their brain said, here's what matters, actually getting the words on paper. You know what? If you get them just right, you're going to be JK rolling. You know, the book will be recognized. Maybe some gatekeepers at first won't recognize your brilliance,

but then someone will, and then you will be a billionaire. You know? So let's just get into the writing shed and write, and we can tell people we're out there writing, and we can post about it on Instagram, writing life, hashtag, or whatever, and let's rock and roll. Now, if you actually confronted the reality of let's talk to editors

or professional fiction writers, like what's actually, if I really want to make a go at this, if I want to get better at this and actually maybe have a professional career at fiction writing, they might tell you something like, well, you probably want to start with short stories. And you're going to want to start with these second-tier magazines and see if you can get something accepted. Because it's really hard, right? It's hard to get things into these magazines. And so that's going to push your skill trying to get your writing to a level that gets accepted to the magazines.

And once you finally get there, then you probably have your skills to a place where you can start thinking about moving on to longer form writing. and then you maybe want to join a writer's group and work on some unpublished novellas or, you know, etc. Like, I don't know if that's exactly how things work in fiction writing. I'm just giving a hypothetical here. Now, for the aspiring fiction writer, that story might not be one that they like because you look at these short stories in these magazines,

and man, it seems difficult. They seem more literary. It seems like it would be hard for you to get one accepted. Your writing's not really there. You don't want to go up for the rejection of submitting things. you're like, I just don't think it's going to get accepted. Like you don't like that storyline. That's harder than you wanted to do.

What you wanted to do was Instagram post, hashtag writing life, and spend a lot of time arranging things in the shed where you're writing so that the picture looks nice. But the reality, once you got the data, is like, now you've got to start with these magazines that is really hard. And you might even have to, look, you might even have to hire an editor. You might have to join a writer's group where people are going to edit you. You might even hire a freelance editor for a few hours. just to give you feedback once a month and really be brutal about it.

I mean, if you really wanted to get your chops up, these might be the things that matter. And it's different than the story that your mind will tell you if it's given no data would make it as plan. You can see the same thing in academia. Your assistant professor and you want to make a name for yourself, the story that your mind tells you is like, well,

you've got to be on Twitter more. Yes, if you were on Twitter, more and you had like a big following, then you could be, you could be kind of well known, and then that's going to really help your influence and it's really going to open up things in your career. Is this something that's required some work but not too much work and it's fun? Not super pleasant, but not unpleasant, difficult, but tractable. It seems great.

It's what you would actually like to do. But the reality probably is, you know, it doesn't matter what you need to be doing is struggling to understand other cutting edge papers, and it might take you two years to really understand what's going on with these new trends. But if you can get to the cutting edge of a trend, then you can actually do some real novel work that's going to make a contribution and it's going to make a difference. And it could be the foundation on which you have a lot of Twitter followers anyways, because then you've actually done something worth hearing about.

So again, in the absence of data, your mind will come up with stories about what matters for getting better in your field. And they're really nice stories. The type of stories you want to be true, but they often aren't. And so what you need to do is get some hard data. here's what matters. The best way to get it in most fields is to actually talk to the people who did it,

ask them how their career unfolded, extract from these stories, those targeted skills that go after with deliberate practice. And I'll tell you, Gina, if you do that, almost no one does the most office work fields. If you do, it's going to be like you're on some sort of superpower,

like some sort of performance-enhancing drug. You're going to see that your opportunities and accomplishments, autonomy, and therefore interest and satisfaction your work will expand quickly. All right, good question. Let's shift gears here a little bit and talk about something less exciting.

And by that I mean boredom. Hello, Mr. Newport. My name is Johannes, and I'm a disciple of depth from Germany learning my way through medical school. Thank you for your work. It saves my mind in this world of constant restriction. So here is my question.

In deep work, you explained the importance of boredom. In digital minimalism, you talked about solitude. How do these concepts get together? While I fight boredom extremely valuable, I struggle these days to be in a state of not getting stimulated. That is why I'm also interested in your own practice of boredom, since I hope for practical ideas to integrate it into my daily life more regularly and get better at it myself. Well, this is a good question because boredom and solitude are obviously too, concepts that are related.

But they also have some key differences. Boredom is something I talked about in particular in my 2016 book, Deep Work, whereas solitude is something I talked about in my more recent 2019 book, digital minimalism. Boredom, at least in the way I talked about it, was more relevant to the world of work, and solitude, at least in the way I talked about it, was more relevant to the world outside of work. So let me quickly make those distinctions. So in deep work, I had a chapter that I titled Embrace Boredom. And my pragmatic suggestion within that chapter was that you should on a regular basis

put yourself in a situation in which you crave stimuli, but you don't satisfy that craving. You just allow yourself to be craving that stimuli, but you don't give yourself any novel stimuli. you just keep on doing whatever it is you're doing that's not that stimulating, that's kind of boring. So whatever. You're raking the leaves, and you just rake them for a while longer, even though your mind is bored. You let it be bored. Now, why is that a good idea and what's its relevance to the world of work? Well, my argument was that it's not that there is an intrinsic value to boredom relevant here.

It's not that being bored is in itself positive. I actually was being way more functionalist. The reason why I said you have to get used to boredom is because if you don't, if you always react to every moment of boredom by giving your mind a shiny, distracting treat delivered with algorithmically optimized precision through your phone, it's going to lose its taste for it.

And then like Pavlov's dogs salivating, every time they heard the dinner bell, your mind is going to learn. Every time I feel boredom, stimuli. Every time I feel boredom, stimuli. It's going to expect it. So that craving for stimuli is going to get stronger and stronger as it is consistently reinforced.

Now, what's the problem with that? Well, what happens when you're at work the next day and you have something difficult to work on? And so you're going to do deep work. It's cognitively demanding, and you're trying to do this work without any cognitive context shifts. If your brain has been trained, boredom means distraction. Bordom means distraction.

It is not going to tolerate sustained concentration on this work, because by definition, sustained concentration on work is boring in the sense that there's not a lot of novel stimuli because you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. There's very little novelty, so it will by definition make you feel bored. So if you're not used to that at all, you're not going to go through with it. The urge to look at your phone, the urge to check your email. the urge to open a browser tab will become overwhelming. On the other hand, if you expose yourself to boredom on a regular basis,

then your mind says, okay, we've done this before. I'm Pablau's dog, and I know sometimes when the bell rings, I don't get food. So the connection has been severed. So someone who has a regular dose of boredom in their life is going to have a lot easier time sustaining concentration when it comes time to actually concentrate on something important. Now, you don't have to be bored all the time. Again, it's just enough that sometimes boredom is not rewarded.

And so that's why I say embrace boredom. And Johannes, I think if you put this into practice, that creeping sensation you have that you describe in your question of it being increasingly difficult for you to resist distraction, I think that is going to start to diminish. once you've really broken that connection, that boredom always means stimuli. Now, solitude,

solitude is a related issue. But in my book, digital minimalism, I come at solitude from a different angle. So solitude is a state in which you are free from input from other minds. So it's a state in which you are not processing input that was generated in another mind. You're not talking to someone, you're not reading something, you're not listening to something.

Now, solitude can be quite related to boredom. I mean, often being in a state of solitude can be boring, but sometimes it's not, right? I mean, you're alone with your own thoughts and looking at the world around you. Sometimes your own thoughts are interesting. Sometimes the world around you is interesting. You know, I saw a headline the other day from the LA Times that was talking about fire tornadoes. They were seeing fire tornadoes related to some of the wildfires in California.

So look, you are absolutely in a state of solitude. If you're sitting on top of your house, you know, with the garden hose trying to wet it so it doesn't catch on fire, and you see a fire tornado probably full of COVID. I can't confirm that, but I'm assuming the fire tornado was probably full of COVID. You see the COVID-filled fire tornado coming at you. You are technically in a state of solitude,

but you are unlikely to be bored. So they're overlapping concepts, but not necessarily the same concept. Sometimes it's boring. Sometimes it's not. So why is solitude important? My argument in digital minimalism was it is unnatural for your brain to have no solitude. It used to be the case that solitude was the default mode. I mean, most of your day, you are alone with your own thoughts looking at the world around you.

you know, if you didn't have a smartphone, or you didn't have a walkman, or you didn't happen to be in a meeting around someone, it was just you, your thoughts, the world around you. You're pushing the plow, mending the fence, punching the metal on the factory assembly line. We spent a lot of time in solitude. When you take that all away, which really only became possible in the last 10 or 15 years or so, once we had this combination of smartphone technology plus ubiquitous worldwide, wireless high-speed internet access.

This makes us possible to banish solitude in every last moment. In every last moment, you have any brief instant of downtime, that little glowing piece of screen, can offer you an algorithmically optimized distraction. There's no reason why you have to be alone with your own thoughts anymore. My argument in digital minimalism is that this is a radical experiment. It's never before

been possible in human history, and we have a lot of evidence that says our brain can't handle it. To be in a state of processing an input from another human is a high alert state. The brain of Homo sapiens takes interactions very seriously, and it will devote a lot of neural resources to interactions with other human beings. So if your brain is constantly in that state of processing information from other minds, I've got to say, the Paleolithic brain doesn't quite know the difference between, well, this is a tweet from someone who I'll never meet and has no idea I'm reading it. Your brain doesn't know that. It's like, look, I'm just, this is a person who's saying things, I'm processing it. So I'm in high alert mode. Let's go. If you're in that high alert

mode all the time, it exhausts your brain, and the result is anxiety. So that was my big hypothesis from digital minimalism is that if you go into a state of solitude deprivation, which you can easily do by just looking at your phone at every moment of boredom, your anxiety is going to go up. And it's because you have put your brain into a state that is equally as artificial, as if, you know, you were taking some sort of drug that was crossing the blood brain barrier. It's not a normal state for the brain to be in all the time, and it's going to create problems. All right? So the related concept, solitude is boring, but not always because of COVID tornadoes full of fire.

boredom is important not all the time but just enough that you recognize that it's a possibility and you lose the pevaluvian connection solitude is important because if you don't have any solitude you're going to be anxious and the two overlap because if you pursue solitude on a regular basis not only are you going to thin off the anxiety that comes from solitude deprivation but a lot of that solitude is going to take place in a context that do not include COVID-filled fire tornadoes And so we'll probably be a little bit boring. So you can kind of kill two birds with one stone here.

Putting regular doses of solitude will probably also give you regular doses of boredom, though they could also be separate endeavors. So I appreciate that question because these are two issues that really seem similar. They're a little bit subtle. The differences are a little bit subtle. But the underlying dynamics, I think, are very important, both for professional success and happiness in your life outside of work. So I appreciate the chance to talk about it.

I think we have time to throw in one or two. Two more quick questions. Hi, Cal. My name is Emily, and I work as a user experience designer. And I really love your blogs as well as your books, especially deep work and so good they can't ignore you. I'm struggling in finding the, what is deep work meaning in a creative design field. And right now I'm building UI kits, and I'm just plugging in components. from one screen to another, and it almost feels like busy work, even though it's required within my job.

And I want to call more time to do deep work, more critical thinking, more problem solving. And I was hoping if you could point me to the right direction. I know that one of your tip is to think if a smart college student, recent grad, could be able to solve this. and unfortunately I feel that applies to 80 to 80% of my job anyhow, really grateful that you made a podcast

you're awesome and thank you well I think the key idea you mentioned in your question was the bright college student test so let me briefly elaborate that for the

the listeners. So this was an idea for my book Deep Work, where I said, if you're trying to figure out if a particular professional activity is something that could qualify as deep work, ask yourself the following question. How long would it take to train a recent college grad who's smart but has no particular training in your field? How long would it take to train them to do this task that you're about to do? And if the answer is, you know, a day, then what you're doing probably doesn't qualify as deep work. In particular, it is probably not satisfying the property that what you're doing is cognitively demanding and skilled.

If on the other hand, you said, well, look, I don't know, it might take years. They would probably have to get further education. They'd have to master this system. They would need to have a lot of experience working with these type of client. So maybe it would take two or three years before they could probably really take on this task and do it at a reasonable level of quality. Then what you're doing probably does qualify. as deep work.

So I think the issue that Emily has here is that most of what she does fails that test. Recent college guy could do it with very little training. Emily, you're right to be concerned. This is a dangerous place to be from the perspective of career stability and career trajectory. My thesis is that in knowledge work, these deep efforts, things that require intense concentration, that they leverage skills, they're cognitively demanding that you do without context switching, is that these efforts really move the needle.

Whereas shallow efforts, though, important, don't move the needle. They don't produce a ton of value. They're useful and they have to happen, but they're not producing a lot of new value. So they are unlikely to be the foundation of, for example, accelerated career growth. So once you've done this analysis and said, you know what, in my own career right now, I'm not doing a lot of actual deep work, you should have alarm bells going off. That reduces the stability of your job.

That reduces the resilience of your job. That reduces the rate at which you're going to acquire a new career capital, which as we know is the foundation with which you can build a satisfying and meaningful working life. So what should you do? You need to re-engineer your job to have more efforts in it that would pass the bright college student test. You need to find something that you can add to your job that leverages skills that you have picked up or will pick up, and there would not be something that a 21-year-old could pick up

and easily start doing a day after they learned what you were up to. You want to regularly be doing deep work efforts in your office job, if possible, because again, that is the foundation on which everything good is going to happen in your career. So essentially what you're doing here, is you're going to earn your way into harder work. You have to survey around and say, what effort is within the adjacent possible

of either my current skill set or skills that I could pick up pretty quickly, given where I already am? What efforts are in that adjacent possible that I could then request to take on? Now, this is an easy request to make. Most bosses or supervisors are happy to have someone say, I want to take on more work or harder things

or things are going to create more value. As long as you can show your qualified to do it, that's usually an easy yes. but you actually have to make that move and ask. So that's what I would recommend. Look in the adjacent possible. In UX design, right now you're making UX kits, but there's a lot of efforts within UX design that are harder,

that are more skilled, that require more complex technical skills and require more experience. You need to be adding some of those into your working life as soon as you can. And if you do not feel qualified right now for any of those sort of higher value, more complicated, hard for a college graduate one year out of school to do type efforts, if you don't feel like there's any of those that you actually could tackle right now, well, now you have your deliberate practice target.

So to go back to our question from Gina from before, then now you have, this is what you're doing for the next year, is you're deliberately building up one of these skills so that you can take on more deep efforts. But that would be my advice. Emily, you're right to ask this question. if you're more than a couple years in a job and there's nothing you're doing that a 21-year-old couldn't pick up pretty quickly, that really should be alarm bells.

It's time for you to start deliberately building skills and proactively taking on harder, more challenging, deeper activities. Everything good will come from that shift. All right, we have a couple minutes left. Let's do one more quick question. This one will be about habits. Hi, Cal, this is Lisa. I'm wondering if you could speak a little more about the key. keystone habits that you are tracking.

I know they will tend to be different from person to person, but I'm wondering if you've learned any best practices about the types of activities that lend themselves to tracking or anything that you found that hasn't worked out. So what Lisa is asking about here is my frequent suggestion to have a set of what I often call metrics. So Lisa said keystone habits. I often call these metrics.

but simple behaviors that you track every day. In fact, the planner, I have this planner coming out in November, which I haven't talked a lot about yet. I will when we get closer to it, but I have this time block planner coming out in November that makes it easier to do time block planning and weekly planning, but I included in this planner a space for tracking metrics every single day because I think it's really important.

And so this is what Lisa is asking about, how do you choose to write metrics to track? Well, one thing I'll say is that what makes a metric a good metric is, first of all, that it stands in for a larger mindset that you think is valuable. Think of it as the avant-garde of a larger invading force, that if you do this one habit every day, it is signaling to yourself that the underlying general area of focus that that habit represents is something that you take seriously.

So, for example, I track within my professional life, I track a metric that I call to-do. I write the word to-do in my metric tracking space in a colon, and then I have one or two hash marks after it. So what do these things represent? Well, in the morning, if I actually look at all of my task lists, the different Trello, I use to keep track of and contextualize and configure all of my different work.

If I actually look at all of those and look at my weekly plan and look at my calendar, then I get a hash mark next to to-do on that little sheet of paper I track my metrics. And if I do the same thing at the end of the day, and I go back at the end of the day and do a full shutdown and actually look at everything, I get a second hash mark. And that's what I'm looking for, to do colon, hash-hash every day. Now, that alone is not a full. productivity system. I'm not tracking all of the elements of my capture, configure,

control productivity philosophy. This is actually quite a small bit of it, but it is a leading indicator here, right? If I actually take the time of confronting everything on my plate in an organized way in the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, what that signals to myself is I am using a system. I am being structured about how I manage my time. and everything else kind of follows after that. Well, as long as you're taking the time to see what's everything on my plate and see it in all the systems, you're much more likely to use those systems throughout the day. And once you do that at the end of the day and really shut things down,

you're much more likely to update all of your systems. So this one simple habit doesn't capture everything that's important to do to be productive in a professional space, but if you do this one habit, you're much more likely to do all the other things. You signal to yourself, yes, this was a structured day. I was being careful about what was on my plate. that's what makes a good habit. The other thing I track with respect to my professional life, another thing I track is deep work hours.

Now, again, there's a lot more things relevant to figuring out what to work on and how to work on it, but I just keep a simple tally with hash marks how many hours of deep work that I did today. That simple thing that, hey, I'm keeping track of that. Signals to myself, deep work moves the needle, deep work matters, you've got to fight for it. You're going to feel bad if you do none because you're going to have to put a big zero down there

next to the deep work metric. And you don't want to do that. So put in the effort to make time for it. And you're signaling to yourself that I take seriously undistracted cognitive efforts. That's a key part of my job. All right. So again, it's not a metric that tracks everything relevant to how I figure out what to work on or how I work on it, but it's a leading edge indicator. And if I do that, then the other things are going to follow because it signals to myself,

I care about this. So Lisa, that's one piece of advice I would give. The habit should be a signal to yourself that that some whole area you care about in your working life is something that you are giving attention to. The other thing it needs to be is low enough friction and easy enough that you can do it consistently. Now, it shouldn't be so easy that it's trivial. Like, it shouldn't just be that I touch the notebook. you know, which I keep track of my task. I just, I touched it.

Am I doing so? I signaled that I care about my productivity. That's too easy. But it also shouldn't be something that maybe requires 90 minutes of time. And to be honest, it's something that there's any number of common confluence of circumstances that could make it impossible to accomplish. And then you're just not doing it three, four times a week. And there's something you can do about that. That habit, you're going to lose all steam for it.

It's going to go away. So it should be somewhere in between. I can fight most days to get some deep work. in. So the deep work habit tracking habit is useful. I can check that to do list in the morning and I can check it in the evening. It takes about five minutes. I don't want to do it and I have to

expend a little effort, but it's not impossible and I can always fit it. And so that's a good one. So that's what you should be looking for, Emily. So they should be, you know, on the avant-garde of a larger invading force of a, within a topic you care about. And they should be easy enough you can do every day but hard enough that

it actually requires just a little bit of effort because otherwise who cares, you're not really signaling anything. Look for those two properties, and you will find yourself a good list of metrics. Just keep in mind that, you know, I've talked about this in my full-length episodes of the podcast in recent weeks. It can take a long time to get the right mix. To find the right mix of metrics that actually satisfy these properties,

it might take you a few months. Let's check back in every few weeks, tweak, tweak, tweak, you'll know when you have them. And then once you have them, just make that tracking those things, just a part of your life. Make those metrics, those keystone habits,

just a foundation on which everything else you build. I think it's a really important tactic, and I think it has a lot of success if you're willing to put into work to get it just right. And with that in mind, let's wrap this up.

Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions for the Habit Tunit Mini episode. Do you want to submit your own voice question? You can do so at speakpipe.com slash Al Newport. If you want to help spread the word on this podcast,

or the Deep Life movement more generally, subscribing, reviewing, rating, all of that really matters. We should be back next week with the next full-length episode of deep questions. And until then, as always, stay deep.