Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 23: Email Saunas, Preaching Depth, and Rooted Productivity | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about the puzzling connection between email and saunas, the best way to preach depth to your team, and the under-appreciated power of rooted productivity, among many other topics. I also take some time to answer an Audio Question of the Day.I will be sending out a new request for text questions to my mailing list soon. You can sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:WORK QUESTIONS* Email saunas and the struggle for depth [6:08]* Saying "no" when new to a job [10:24]* Dealing with unexpected free time [14:57]* Should I become a professor? [17:55]* Getting others to buy in on Deep Work [25:12]* Find time for hard thinking in a job that focuses on soft skills [27:07]AUDIO QUESTION OF THE DAY [31:51]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS* Effective reading [36:58]* Being productive in an organization that embraces Outlook [40:26]* Using entertainment-only devices [44:19]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS* Exercise routines for focus [46:48]* Keeping track of your productivity habits [53:10]* Feeling stuck at home during the pandemic [59:56]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 Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries for my readers about work technology and the deep life. Now, before we get started with today's show, I thought we would do a quick status update on the podcast itself. We started in late May. It's now late August, so we've been going for a few months now. We've done 23 episodes, and so I thought we should just step back and say what's coming next. So I just checked my hosting company that actually hosts these podcasts. And it said in the last 30 days, we've had 133,000 downloads. So that's good.

I think we found an audience. I think people are liking this. We tend to do pretty well in the technology category ranking at iTunes. That's where we're categorized. We're typically, I don't know, right around number 25. So I think that's good. I think we have a solid foundation, probably largely my existing, readers from an existing newsletter and blog.

And so I think we've hit a good, I don't know, hit on a good format here. So I look forward to expanding our audience going forward. Speaking of which, I have camera equipment now. I'm not quite sure when I'm going to get time to set this up. But I think I will start with filming clips. So maybe particular answers, maybe particularly energetic rants.

I'll have video on that as well so that you can actually see, see what I look like as I get riled up. And then maybe the goal would be eventually to be able to have a video of the entire podcast. For each podcast, you can have the audio or you can watch the video. It's going to take a little bit more work because I don't do the show because it's a monologue format.

I don't do the show in one take. So there'd have to be a little bit of editing, but whatever, we'll figure that out. Nothing that money can't solve. So speaking about money, ads are coming soon. The company I'm working with a great company that works with some other really good podcast that I respect and some really good podcasters that I respect. I have a lot of interest in the show. We have some ads coming.

We're not going to go overboard here, guys. It's not going to be a ton of ads, but enough to keep the lights on literally in the Deep Work HQ. And of course, if you're interested in advertising, you can send a note to me at interesting at calnewport.com and I will pass it along to this company. And they follow up on all of those, all of those leads. You know, people have been asking me ads versus like a. Sam Harris paywall style model. And for now, I think the best thing to do when a show is still

growing is not to put it behind a paywall because that basically locks in your current growth or really slows it down. I really think we're in the early stages. I want to keep the show free and open and easy for anyone to dive into or check out. So I think ads is what we're going to try for now. And then we'll see where the show goes. Finally, I appreciate the ratings and reviews. Again, I really don't know how podcasts grow. I mean, I don't understand exactly do people browse for these things. Are there recommendations given on some of the more advanced platforms? I obviously don't know enough about this particular medium that I'm participating in. I do think ratings and reviews help. I've heard interviews help as well. And I am going to start doing those. There's really no reason why I

haven't done interviews other than just this is a really busy time of year. I have all the pieces in place to do them. It's just until we get through late September in the life of a college professor, it's just a really busy time. So I'm trying not to introduce anything new until I can get through this beginning of the semester period. And then once I'm ready to add new things again, we're going to see video, we're going to see guests, so hopefully that'll help. But I do appreciate in the meantime the ratings and reviews. I want to read one of the recent five-star reviews from Apple just sort of as a way to give some think. So this review came from Evan in Arizona. and he said the following,

I discovered Cal Newport's books about a year ago and they helped transform my work and personal life. Upon finding his podcast this summer in the midst of a challenging environment, it did it once again as I regained focus and depth in my life. Now I have weekly reminders and applicable advice to help me on my path.

This podcast is essential to not only my success, but my sanity. No, thanks, Evan, I appreciate that. I feel the same way, to be honest. I'm not in front of crowds anymore. I'm not in my classrooms anymore. I don't go to studios where I can sit down across from the host of a TV show or radio show anymore. And so this ability to talk with my listeners and my readers, even if we're not in the same room,

has been good for my sanity as well. So thank you for that. And thank you to everyone else who's contributed their five-star reviews. All right. One other quick update before we get going. If you're on my email newsletter at caldnewport.com or, you're, You follow my blog at Calnewport.com. You know that on Monday, the 31st, which should be the day when you're hearing this podcast,

this is when this podcast launches. Scott Young and I have launched our latest online course. It's called Life of Focus. It's based on the ideas from three books. Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, which are my two books. And Scott Young's bestseller, Ultra Learning. It's a three-month course. There's one month dedicated to ideas from deep work.

There's one month dedicated to ideas from digital minimalism and one month dedicated to ideas from ultra learning. For more details about that course, what's in it, how to register for it, etc. Just go to calnewport.com on Monday afternoon. I'm posting a link to all that information. All of that will be open for one week. All right, that's enough of that.

Let's get started with today's show. As always, we kick things off with work questions. HAP asks, I am a civil engineer managing projects for a firm. I spend time in meetings, replying to emails and doing deep work to move projects forward, such as calculations, checking, work, reviews, etc. I always struggle with the tension of how to manage all of this. Some of the meetings are important and I try not to live in email treating it more like Asana, but it can often feel like I have no time for deep work.

What advice would you give? Well, first of all, I'm interested in this analogy you have of treating your email like Asana. I don't quite know what that means, but I'm sure there's probably a really effective productivity nugget buried in there. It's probably better than the variation that I've heard from Swedish productivity experts, which is that you should only check your email in Asana. You know, if it's uncomfortable enough, then you'll check it less often. I feel like I should caveat that. it's not real. I've got to get emails for people who ruined their MacBook because they

brought it into their sauna to check their emails and short it out the circuits. I mean, I don't know. Maybe some Swedish productivity guru somewhere recommends that, but I don't vouch for it. All right, Hap, let's get to your real question here. You feel overwhelmed. You have a lot to do. You have deep work to do. You feel like you don't get to it. You know, my advice here is always clear. You need to face the productivity dragon and the way to face the productivity dragon and you're your case is to time block. You actually need to give every minute of your day a job. Try your best to actually optimally allocate your time.

And what this forces you to do is to confront a couple things. How much time is really available? The first thing you do is put your meetings on your time block schedule. What's left? You have to face that reality, even if it's really small and even if that makes you unhappy. And then you do your best to schedule. the time that remains and you're forced to confront how long do these things actually take. It might find out that you thought you're going to get seven things done in between your meeting

and you got done too because the first one took almost all of your time and he thought you'd be able to do it real quick. If you need to check your email a lot, that has to show up on your schedule. And if it's urgent, like you can't let things slide in your email, then you're going to have to schedule a lot of time to check email. And it will be there. staring back at you in black and white. This is what I mean by facing the productivity dragon. Don't just have a vague sense of I'm busy. I don't get to enough deep work.

I think there's too much on my plate. Don't just have a vague sense. See it. Go into that metaphorical cave. You know, leave your sauna. Make sure you take your MacBook with you because I know you were checking your email in there because of good sweetest productivity advice. Leave your sauna.

Bring your MacBook. Go into the cave. Let's mix all the metaphors. Look at the productivity dragon. Here's how much time I have. here's how much time it actually takes me to do things here's how much time i'm actually doing shallow work here's how much time i'm actually spending on deep work and if what you see is scary then you say we're going to have to do some battle when i say do some battle i mean then you're

going to have to make some hard choices there's going to have to do some hard decisions look if this deep work you talk about i'm looking at my notes here doing calculations checking work reviews if that is absolutely crucial if that's crucial for your firm if that's crucial for your firm time for satisfying clients, for producing value, then it has to be done. And if there's not enough time for it to get done, if when you faced a productivity dragon, that's clear, you say then we have to change something. And at least you know the battle you're doing. And I don't know how that fight's going to go down. It depends on the details of your work. And maybe you have to somehow refine your meeting protocol. Maybe you have to take some of these implicit processes that you're

deploying through email and make them explicit processes that can be handled more optimally. Maybe you need to hire more support staff, whatever it is. These changes aren't going to be made as long as it's just this vague sense of, I'm always busy, I'm always on email, I don't think enough deep work is getting done. Face the dragon, make it clear, see it black and white, and if you need to do battle, do battle, but at least you know what you're fighting. All right, next up is Ruben. Here is Ruben's question.

Two conflicting pieces of advice. You need to learn to say no, but also show up when people are. you also show up when you are starting so that people get to know your work. How do I reconcile this for people starting on a field or who are young? Well, Rubin, when you're young, don't let that advice conflict. You just don't get to say no as often. If you're new to a field, if you're new to a job, if you're new to the workforce in general, you want to be the person who gets it done, who shows up, who does say yes,

who's incredibly organized, who people trust, I always say these same two things, who people trust is not going to drop the ball, that if they put something on your plate, they do not have to come back and check on it. You're not going to drop the ball. I can't emphasize how critical that is, especially if you're new. And two, be the person who delivers when you say you will deliver. If you say it'll be done by Monday, get it done by Monday. And if it cannot get done by Monday, then you know well ahead of time that it's not

going to get done by Monday and here is the new date. You do those two things, and you're going to rise very quickly in your job. But you're also going to have to say yes a lot. You know, I heard really good advice on this from, of all places, the formal Navy SEAL, Silver Star winner, Jocko Willink, who runs a leadership management firm now where, you know, he consults with companies about having to do leadership. Now, when I think about Jocko, I think about this guy who is an ox of a man, just like this. massively muscular who just tweets pictures of his watch at 4.30 a.m. every morning because that's when he's exercising, you know, right? Scary guy literally broke the back of a friend of his. He wanted to do jih Tjitsu with him and Jocco accidentally broke his back. That's a whole other

story. Anyways, point is, that's what you think about when you think about Jocko, but there was this live show that he uploaded, I guess in his podcast or something, where he was taking advice from the audience. And it was all business people and it was all business productivity advice. And Jocko had incredibly good, incredibly on point, sophisticated, nuanced advice about business productivity. But I just remember someone asked about this. They were complaining about, look, my boss doesn't do this right. It's too much work. The system is all run wrong.

And Jocko's advice based on his military training and his leadership training was suck it up. At least for now. Do you want to change the system? Be the best person in the system for the first two years. years. And then you earn the right to change the system. If you try to do it before, nothing happens because you haven't earned the status. I think that's true in a lot of jobs. So, Ruben, I don't know if this is the answer you want to hear, but if you're new, you're going to be a little bit more overloaded. You're going to say yes a lot. And you're going to do those two

things that keep coming back to. Deliver when you say you're going to deliver. Be the person they trust not to drop the ball. You then earn, you know, I would use a terminology career capital, the site my book, so good they can't ignore you. But you could call it what you want to call it you earn the leverage then as you go down the line to be a little bit more selective and to say no uh no i can't take that on right now susan because i you know me you know i'm very careful about my time you know i deliver when i say i'm going to deliver you know you can trust me i know myself really well i've got a full load right now this is a little bit outside of where i think i need to be putting my energy you earned a right to say that so i think young people

you probably have to say no less often say yes more often be so good they can ignore you. And then once you have that capital, take it out for a spin and start to much more aggressively essentialize what's on your plate. Yeah, I can't help but wonder, what would the Cal Newport equivalent be of Jocko taking a picture of his watch at 4.30 every morning when he's just about to work out? Oh, and by the way, then he then he posts a picture of just sweat on the floor. and it'll say something like get after it

the Cal Newport equivalent if I had Twitter and I was trying to be like Jocko what would I tweet? I would tweet a picture of me closing my notebook and instead of saying get after it it would say schedule shutdown complete I think if Jocko was here he would punch me in the head

but there you go this is what you get ladies and gentlemen okay next question Telmo asked about the situation where for some reason during the workday, I can't do what is planned or some free time appears and I don't have my schedule and or task list with me. This question becomes particularly relevant if the unexpected time is more than 15 or 30 minutes. How can I avoid wasting this time? So to interpret that question a little bit,

tell them what for the audience, like what you're asking here based on your elaboration is that sometimes something changes in your schedule and you have a pocket of free time. And you worry that you often waste that 20 minutes that pops up that you weren't expecting, you know, when a call doesn't happen or you finish something too quick and, and you worry about wasting that time. So, I mean, I think my concrete piece of advice is, you know, maybe lighten up a little bit. I think it's okay. Like, if 15 or 20 minutes pops up, if you want to just relax, I think that's fine. I want to worry about optimizing for this sort of rare occurrence where there's an unplanned

moment of time that pops up spontaneously. I mean, if you have something to do, do it. But otherwise, hey, if you need to check in on, you know, Washington National Sports Talk. I mean, maybe you don't want to check on that right now because it's not exactly, they're not doing that well. But whatever your equivalent is, that's fine. The only two pieces of follow-up advice I would give is,

first, if you have a pocket of free time and you're just going to do whatever, just don't have that whatever be something that's going to cause an excessive network switching cost. Now, in the work context, that's going to be if you expose yourself to work-related inputs that are different than what you were working on, different than what you are going to work on, and that's going to leave loops open. So, like, if you just jump into your email inbox in 15 minutes, that could be a problem, because you're going to see more email in there most likely than you can answer in 15 minutes, and you've created very relevant open loops. Work-related stuff, people expecting answers from you.

You don't have time to get them answers, and then you're trying to switch over to another. work project. That's going to give you a lot more attention residue than if you're looking at baseball stats and then you switch back to a work effort. The second little piece of advice here is you say you don't have your schedule or task list with you. Well, you should have your schedule with you. I mean, I really do recommend time block planning on paper and just having that paper with you. Now, starting November 10th, the good news is Telmo that my official time block planner will be released and will be available in the U.S. and I believe the U.K. markets as well. A very handsome looking notebook in which you can make your daily time block plan and have

with you wherever you go. Now, of course, you don't need mine. Just any notebook will work. But that's the reason why, right there, why I always did my time block planning analog is because I wanted it to be with me whether or not I was at my computer or at my desk. Okay. Kevin asks, how do I know whether or not I should pursue a career in academia? I'm also realizing that one, it's challenging to maintain a good work-life balance in academia.

And two, the odds of landing a tenured faculty position, especially in computer science, are pretty low. All right, it's a good question, Kevin. I think there's a, I don't know how we want to think about this. there's a sort of gatekeeping question, which is whether or not a career in academia is even an option. And then there is the career residence question, which is whether or not you think that's a good idea for yourself. The gatekeeping question is important. Now, I know from your elaboration that you are studying at the undergraduate level, you're studying computer science at a very good program, and you're working on research mentored by very good names. So that's a great start.

This is to be really clear about what it will take going forward from here to get, and I'm going to talk about a research-oriented position in an R1 school. So not necessarily MIT, but just in an R1 school. That's a Carnegie ranking that means that you're at a certain level of research productivity. But if you're at an R1 school, you're going to have graduate students. A school we have graduate students, you're getting NSF and DARPA grants, and you're expected to publish and travel the world and talk about your papers. Like assuming we're talking about that academia,

and we're not talking about teaching focused academia, which I know a little bit less about. But here's what it's going to take. You're going to need to go from your program to a top PhD program, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, you know, Cornell, Illinois, or brown of champagne, Berkeley. And one of the really good programs, there's others. I'm just missing a few there.

You've got to go to a really top program and you have to be willing to really get after it from a research perspective, you know, you need to have this sort of discipline drive to I want to write a lot of papers. I want to learn at the feet of whoever my advisor is and become like the non-union equivalent of that advisor, right? I want to study under a famous advisor. When I'm on the job market, well, they can't hire my famous advisor, but I can do kind of the same work. I trained under him or her. And so now I can get hired, right? So you want to be willing to do that work. If you're going to go to grad school and do the sort of of woe is me dissertation hell thing. That's fine, but that's probably not going to get you.

It's not the mindset that's going to get you the publications is going to get you the jobs. If you want to go to grad school and get really heavily involved in graduate student organizations and graduate school governance and this and that, that's fine. Probably not going to get you one of the enough research to get one of those jobs. I'm just saying like this is the mindset you have to have. I am a star. I'm going to be a star and I'm going to publish really good stuff. I'm going to publish a lot of it. I'm going to work with the best. people, I'm going to push myself and I'm going to publish. Okay. If you're willing to do that and you're doing that at a good school and you have a really good advisor and you're a star in your program, then you'll find an

R1 job. I think it's all possible for you. So you pass the gatekeeping threshold. So the question is, does it resonate? I would push back on the notion that it is challenging to maintain a good work, life balance in academia. I would say a lot of academics don't maintain a good work life balance, but I don't know that that's intrinsic to the job so much as it's intrinsic to the fact the job has very little structure. A lot of people don't do great in that environment. There is no structure.

There is no boss. There is no Q1 report. There is no someone assigning you projects. And it's easy to spin off into directions of burnout-induced overload. Now, I think if you're a, like if you're a Cal Newport, blog, reading, podcast, listening type person.

If you're organized about your time, if you're time block planning, if you're doing quarterly, weekly, daily planning, if you're very careful and aware of what's on my plate, how much should be on my plate, you're facing the productivity drag and you produce things when you say are going to produce things. Things don't fall off your plate. You're doing all this stuff. You're prioritizing deep over shallow.

All the stuff I preach. It's completely possible to have a completely fine work life balance. I have a good work life balance. I mean, I rarely, rarely, rarely work on computer science, Georgetown-related efforts past five or five-thirty. And I have, I don't know, seven jobs. So, I mean, and so, okay, if I can do it with seven jobs, then, you know, you can do it.

You can do it with the one job you'll have as a pre-tenured professor. So just to clarify, like a lot of these seven jobs are Georgetown jobs. It's just that as you move up in the ranks, you're given other responsibilities beyond just teaching and research. And I have a bunch of those on my plate right now. And I'm writing books and I'm writing articles and I'm doing this podcast, etc., etc. All right. So, Kevin, you can handle the work-life challenge.

It is true. You're a computer scientist. The field you're in is a field in which you could be making a lot more money, not in academia. That's a big deal. You need to think about that. If you think you like the idea of the money, don't waste time at grad school.

You know, maybe a master's degree. If you get a master's degree, you lose two years of earning potential, but you come in at a high enough level of entry level salary that it kind of compensates. But if you do a whole PhD in the good industry, you end up economically worse off. Yes, a PhD is going to get paid more day one

than an undergrad at the same big tech company, but the PhD student spent five, six years getting the PhD. That undergrad five, six years, into their career at the big tech company, we'll be making a lot more than the PhD's entry-level salary, if that makes sense. So there's a lot of money at the table, especially if you're in machine learning or AI,

and there's like bank or style money on the table. So you have to keep that in mind. I mean, how important is that to you? Academia is not going to directly make you a lot of money. If you don't care about the money, then you have to say, does the lifestyle, that's the autonomy with both the pleasures and the pressures,

that come with full autonomy, does that appeal to you? Do you like the idea of like, this is on me, I'm coming up with my own projects, no one's looking over my shoulder, you know, I have my deep work fisherman's shack down by the lake where I go and try to solve proofs. Like if that type of stuff resonates with you, then you really can't get that almost anywhere else but being a professor. If that makes you nervous, if you like the idea of money, then maybe don't become a professor. All right, so I covered a lot of ground there, Kevin, but I hope that's useful.

You know, just to summarize really briefly for everyone. everyone. It is very, very hard to get a tenure track job in an R1 university. So you really have to have this mindset of I'm going to a top school, working with top people, and I'm going to get after it when I'm there. I'm going to think I'm a star whether or not I am. I'm going to attack the work like that. If you can publish, publish, you can get those positions. Once you have those positions, I think work-life balance is possible. It's hard, but you know, it's possible. So then it's just a question of whether that lifestyle resonates with you more than the alternatives. All right, let's move on now to Clint.

Clint asks, how do you get other people to buy into deep work? Well, Clint, I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I think people now, for the most part, are much more likely to know and understand and appreciate deep work than they were five years ago. You know, a lot of people have read my book, a lot of people have written articles about my book.

The term deep work, I mean, it shows up in Microsoft Outlook now. you know, in the software itself, the term deep work is built in, right? So I think the secret is out. So the question is not trying to convince someone to understand deep work or think it's important. I think that secret is kind of out. I think the real question is, how do you have a sufficient respect for deep work integrated into your organization? And there, I think the question is about what are we doing now? What do we want to be doing?

You don't have to make an argument for deep work, but you do need to make an argument for how much of this should be going on in our organizations. What are the deep work efforts we think are going to have the biggest payoffs, the efforts that if we don't do them, there's no way for our organization to not only grow, but even just survive. And then once you identify those, say, okay, so how much of that are we doing? How hard is it to do it? If we're not doing these activities very often, or if we're not doing them in a state of depth, we're doing them in a state of fragmented attention. Why? Is it meetings?

Is it email? What's going on? Great. How do we carve out space for it? And that's what I always recommend. I always recommend the people. It's not about saying stop distracting me. It's about saying, who.

I think if we hit this level of deep work, we would be doing much better as an organization. Now let's work backwards from that goal. So I think they know about the concept already, Clint. What they need is a way to tackle the problem. And the way to tackle the problem is saying, okay, now we know what deep work is. How much do we need to do? How much are we doing? How do we close that gap?

All right, let's do one more work question. This one comes from Nathan. Nathan asks, how do I apply deep work and deliberate practice to a job focused on soft skills? I'm a full-time minister. Lots of my work is one-on-one with people, and it's difficult to figure out both how to get better at some of these things and how to apply deep work. Well, Nathan, I hear from a lot of ministers. Deep Work is a popular book among the... minister class. So I've learned a lot from these conversations. And I would say the standard

minister position should be about 30 to 40% of your time dedicated to cognitively demanded undistracted activities. This should include studying contemplation, writing such as sermon writing and strategy, strategizing for your congregation for your church and how to grow it. So you really should be spending probably, roughly speaking, 30 to 40% of your time doing deep work and 70 to 60 percent of your time being responsive, tending to your flock, the one-on-one interactions, responding to people's issues, because you are right, that's a big piece of it. So that's the ratio, I think, is good. And so then the question is, how do you make sure you get 30 to 40 percent of your time

dedicated to deep work? And all of the types of strategies I've talked about apply here, time block planning. So you can actually figure out in advance. This is what I'm doing my deep work and this is what I'm doing the other stuff. and then efficiency surrounding the non-deep efforts to prevent that from expanding and taking over all of your time and making it impossible to hit that 30 or 40 percent. So the way you you get this interactions, this one-on-one, these soft-scale activities and get it down the 70 to 60 percent of your time instead of all of your time is it's with processes, it's with structures. It's with, well, maybe I just don't have an email address. it's my name.

And everyone from the random parishioner to the head of the fellowship committee to my bookkeeper all bother me with the same email address at any time and expect an answer. Maybe we need processes. For different types of communication, we have different types of pipes.

And those pipes have different expectations. You know, maybe I meet with the various leadership of the various committees. We have standing meetings and we do it on Monday. So after the busy Sunday, we kind of figure out our plan for the week can, and therefore cut the back and forth emails by a drastic amount. Maybe I have office hours for parishioners where they know I can just, you know, Nathan's

going to be here. I can grab them. I can talk to them. So I don't have to just send off an email or be upset. And maybe some of those are Zoom based and maybe some of those are in person. You know, I think that in person thing is useful. Obviously, it was complicated by COVID, but I think in most places there's, there's, you with just a little bit of creativity, safe ways to do it, whether it be outside or you have

giant congregations, these giant, I don't know, look, look, I'm not a, I'm not an expert on this, but you have these giant, whatever the word is, sanctuaries or where you actually have your services where it's probably not so hard to actually sit at a great distance from someone, but still be there and be present with each other, right? And so that's what I would say. And this kind of overlaps what I was talking to about Clint, right? It's all about clarity. You have to get past this, I don't do enough deep work. I do too much shallow work. I wish I wish the ratio was better. You got to just get specific. So I'm helping to get specific. I just happen to know a lot about your line of work because I've talked to a lot of people about these top of your line of work.

So I happen to know 30 to 40% deep is probably optimal. So you just got to say that's the stake in the ground. How do we work backwards from that and build up our metaphorical time management house from that initial position. And those are the types of things that work. You get processes, you get structure, you differentiate pipes. You do what you have to do. But if you hit that ratio, I think you're going to be delivering a lot more value, saving a lot more souls, calming a lot more distress, spreading a lot more of the good word.

I'm probably, by the way, messing up all the proper, I'm probably messing up all the proper Christian phrases here, my apologies. But you know what I'm saying. You will be better at your job if you hit that ratio. and so know what you want to hit, insist on hitting it, and then work backwards from there to say, okay, how do I satisfy that demand? All right, good question, Nathan. That's enough for work questions.

Why don't we do a quick audio question of the day? Hi, my name's Jennifer, and I'm a graduate student of human rights practice. I speak five languages, and I'm constantly looking for ways to practice my fourth and fifth languages, which is Arabic and Persian. My productivity dilemma is this. I often rely on YouTube to expose myself to Arabic. I watch YouTube channels in Arabic, and I try to also watch the news in Arabic using YouTube or news websites. However, I find myself getting distracted by the number of videos available on those platforms, and although I do get some listening practice done, I often feel that the same tools I used to practice my language skills are stealing my autonomy to use your term

and my attention. Well, this is a good question. I think a lot of people have similar issues where the internet-connected tools that make certain parts of their job easier also become distractions that make doing their actual work harder. So the unique thing you're using the internet for, which is somehow learning 19 languages or whatever incredibly impressive thing it is that you're doing in your life. Whatever the uniqueness is of what you're doing, I think the question is actually more general. So I usually have two things to recommend the people in this case. The first thing I recommend is to have a separation between gathering and processing when it

comes to internet sources of information. There's a piece of advice that came out of my student work. once I had to deal with students who needed to use the internet to gather information for assignments and found themselves never actually getting to the assignments, I introduced this notion of one task should be gathering from the internet the information you need, and that's it. And maybe you don't even give yourself a lot of time for that. And then in a separate session, disconnected from those websites, not looking at those websites.

I used to tell students actually to physically disconnect a computer. You use that information you've gathered. work with it. You separate the two. A relatively quick gathering period that's not requiring a lot of deep work. You're not trying to get your brain free from distraction. You're not trying to get your brain minimizing cognitive network switching costs. You're just looking at grabbing these things. In your case, I'm going on YouTube. Here's the latest Arabic news. Let me grab that link. I'm put in this, you know, in this document or something. And here's a couple random Arabic videos from channels I follow. They speak pretty good. Easy to follow Arabic. Let me grab some recent episodes.

and just like throw all these links into a text file or something, right? It's not deep work, you're just gathering information. Now unrelated, you're like, okay, I am now going to at a different time work with this information. And so for you, that could mean here are the four videos I gathered. Maybe I'm going to go someplace specific with my iPad. You know, like I like to sit outside or in a particular room of the house. I'm just going to watch those four videos, very clear.

No web surfing. I'm not going around YouTube. I'm just looking at these four videos. my processing is separate from the gathering. That makes a big difference because your brain when you are surfing and gathering is in a completely different state than when you're actually working with the information that you gathered. The second thing I recommend is to introduce tools so that when you're in that second phase of actually working with the information, that it's almost impossible for you to get distracted.

So in your case, if you actually have to go to YouTube to watch these videos that you gathered, use a browser plugin like distraction-free tube that scrubs the page of all the auto-play and auto-recommendations that all you see when you click on that link is that video. There is no other recommended videos to click. There's no other video that's going to play when it's done. If you want to go find another video, you're going to have to go to YouTube

and do another search or something like this, which is a big enough behavior that is easier to control. you know do those two things and you'll be fine the only addendum i will give you is that in my experience that second step that using technology to make it very difficult to get distracted you typically only need to use that technology for a few weeks maybe a month your brain gets trained okay this is what we do we watch the video we practice this is not web surfing time it loses its itch you'll probably find yourself after a few weeks or a month not even needing to do you know you're not even needing to use the plugin anymore when you get to that processing stage because you have just trained

your mind. You have used that software, that blocking software is a training mechanism. And now you're in the cognitive fitness. You have the cognitive fitness you need to be able to just concentrate, get it done, and not be tempted. So that's what I'd recommend definitely split apart to gathering from the processing and for now use blocking software or plugins to keep that processing step pure. All right. Well, this was sort of a technology related audio question. So let's keep this momentum alive and move on to our technology questions. We'll start with Peter who asks, how do you read a book effectively? Now, arguably, this is maybe not a technology question, but I think of the book, that is the codex,

as a really interesting piece of technology. So we'll treat it like a technology question. And Peter, I would say there's two main categories of reading, behaviors, at least in my world. So there's where I'm reading to gather information. I'm reading this book because I want to know more about this topic because I need to know about this topic for a book or article I'm writing. I want to identify interesting information.

I want to learn more about the topic. I want to essentially fill in a cognitive toolkit here that I can then apply for constructing something of my own. I'm all business in that and I'm hyper-efficient. which means if a chapter is not quite, I'm like, eh, not doing it for me. There's nothing really here that's new or that I need. I'll skip the chapter or I'll skim it. If I get through part two of the book and look at part three,

and like, yeah, part three is examining this aspect of the issue that's not that relevant to my work. I'll skip it. It's a really efficient, kind of ruthless relationship with the text. And then I slow down when I want to understand something, I speed up when I don't need to. And I do my pencil note taking, which I've talked about a lot on the show, where I marked the corner of a page, if there's relevant,

notes and then I put brackets or check marks next to the relevant passages on that page. It makes it very quick to take a book and go back and quickly hone in on all the different relevant quotes, all the relevant passages without having to have any overhead or any extra efficiency. So if I'm just trying to learn something or gather things from a book, I am ruthless. All due respects to the author, I can go through a lot of books in a typical week when I'm in research mode. But there's the other mode.

There's the other behavior. That's when you're reading, I read a lot of, for example, nonfiction, historical nonfiction, or biography nonfiction, or if you're reading a good novel. And to me, all of the value in that type of reading experience

actually comes from a careful read where you give every page it's due. It takes a long time, so it takes a long time. I mean, if you really aren't feeling the book, you should abort it, but I'm not skipping around and I'm not skimming. And that's because the whole point of reading a very good,

let's say, like award caliber piece of historical nonfiction, is that they're setting the context. They're inducing in you and understanding of what this person was like, what that time is like. They're transporting you. That transportation will not work. If you do not actually allow all of the production

of the author to sink in, the quotes, the background, the explanation, the digressions, and really good nonfiction, that plays a really big role. Same thing, of course, with novels. I mean, novels are all about transportation, It transports you.

You're simulating this other world. You're simulating the emotions of other people. It's incredibly powerful. It can be incredibly moving. It can be incredibly entertaining if it's, say, like an adventure style novel, but it requires you to fully engage with the text. So when I'm reading to read, I just want to be in this world. I want to enjoy the process of the book.

I take my time. And it might take me a long time to finish a book. And I might leave it and come back to it. And I get excited about another book. And then I come back to it. But if it's a good book, I'll keep going back to it until it's done. If I'm trying to read to extract information,

then I'm ruthless. Moving on, Alex asks, how can I be productive if my organization uses Outlook? Well, Alex, you don't have to worry. As I mentioned earlier in the show, you can actually find the term deep work on one of the menus in the new version of Microsoft Outlook. So you're fine.

Outlook is going to make you much more efficient. Okay. Maybe it's a little more complicated than that. As an aside, what they actually do with Outlook is there's some sort of concentration mode feature that sort of helps. I don't quite know how it works, but I love the idea of it. That helps you schedule deep work time. They call it concentration time, I think, or focus time. But the explanation of the software itself also says this time is for doing deep work.

So that's what the term comes from. And they have some sort of tool to help you coordinate with other teams. members to make sure you get enough time put aside for deep work or something like that. I think all those features are fine. But my main advice I give you is even if your organization uses productivity software, like the way they do shared calendars, maybe with task lists or assigning tasks to each other, whatever, those are all fine tools. They do not add up through a productivity philosophy.

So you still need to figure out how do you do capture, how do you do configure, how do you do control? And then, yeah, if you have to backfit that, the Outlook to do the stuff to your organization requires you to do, then you can do that. But Outlook or any productivity suite is not by itself going to make you more productive. You got to have a capture system. You got to actually put in the time to do the configure to look at all this stuff and make sense of it and process it, make your plans for what you want to do with it. And you still need the control. Every minute of your day needs a job.

Outlook can't do that for you. So I would say figure out your productivity system. And then if the tools in this productivity software suite, where they're useful, you can use them, where you're required to use them, still use them. But do not let that take away your autonomy and figuring out how you're going to manage your day. And so, for example, I think it's completely reasonable that you could be using Microsoft Outlook for Teams. You have a very sophisticated shared calendar system where people look at when people are available and they try to automatically grab time and schedule meetings and all this type of stuff. and yet you still have a paper time block planner. And maybe when you do your time block plan, you have to go onto your calendar now

and block off times with fake meetings for blocks you've already assigned so people can't grab them. Or just call those pre-assigned blocks. And if say, what are you doing? You can just hold up my time block planner and say, I'm Newporting it. Leave me alone or whatever. Or I'm going to the sauna with my email. What do you want? If you'll indulge the call back there.

That's fine. But I think it's completely reasonable. like a paper notebook that's actually at the core of what you're doing. You could have a to-do system. You're using Trello so that you can contextualize and more easily configure your task. And yet still your office uses Microsoft Outlook. Many people still assign you tasks using the task assignment features and Outlook or how you can embed a task in an email and you can accept it onto your task. Maybe all that's going on. And yet you're just taking those things as soon as they arrive in your system and you accept them and click the buttons and do whatever and you move them right into

Trello or you move them right into your paper notebook. So all I'm trying to say here, Alex, is figure out your own system, build it on my principles of capture, configure control, and then you can work backwards to figure out how to interface with Microsoft Outlook. Do not let any particular software suite dictate how you actually work, because I'm yet to see a software suite that properly encodes what I think to be a highly optimized neuroproductivity approach to getting knowledge work done. So figure out your own thing. backfit at the Microsoft Outlook. All right, let's just do one more technology question

so we can move on to the meat that is the Deep Life Queries. And we'll do for this final question. Let's turn to Joe. Joe wants to know my thoughts on using one device solely for entertainment. He talks about, for example, his plan to buy an iPad that he uses just for browsing and streaming. Joe, I think it's a really good idea.

You know? I think this engineering mindset of optimality can sometimes get in the way of psychology. And I think there's a real psychology to this machine is just for entertainment and streaming. And I keep it over here. And your mind learns that's when I do entertainment or streaming. So when you're on your other machine doing work, you don't have the urge to check on Netflix. And again, the engineering mentality says, no, no, no. All of our energy went into making any of these machines capable of doing all of these things.

They're general purpose computers. Why that iPad is redundant to the other iPad you have? Why would you have two? Why would you have a computer separate than this laptop, etc? I even write about that in my book Digital Minimalism,

how this shift to sort of general purpose parallel processing on computers made a lot of sense if you're an engineer that's thinking about step complexity of algorithms, thinking about parallelism, but it makes a terrible fit to our human psychology.

Our human psychology is not well suited for these general purpose concurrent machines. It could be doing seven or eight things at the same time, and anything you want to do can happen on the same machine. The technical convenience leads to psychological distress. Which is all to say, Joe, I fully endorse this idea of being wildly inefficient and wildly cost and effective and actually owning and using separate machines for separate purposes because we do not take psychology seriously enough. I keep saying this neurological productivity, productivity that takes into account how the brain actually works is the future of gaining effectiveness and efficiency and knowledge work, and this is an example of it. So I like your plan, have a separate iPad for it, draw clear lines in the digital sand. That is being smart about how to actually take this human brain you have, love it or leave it, and get it to produce the best possible life. All right, that's a good batch of technology questions.

Let's keep rolling here and move right into questions about the deep life. R-PAN asks, how do you create an exercise routine to improve your focus? Well, Ar-Pond, as I've talked about on this podcast before, and there's two different things that are relevant when people talk about things like exercise routines. there's what I think of as a physiologically appropriate lifestyle, just a way of living that is in tune with the way that your body expects to function. I think that's crucial. It's crucial not just for happiness,

but for proper cognitive functioning, that if you live in a way that is not tied to what our body in a sort of physiological sense expects, it causes problems, including brain fog, including tiredness, including mood disorder. And then there's exercise routines that are done to train for something or to accomplish a goal.

Like I want to run a marathon. I have an exercise routine to get my mile time down. I want to look more muscular. So I have an exercise routine to get my muscles really big. Let's put that latter group aside because I don't think that's as relevant to what we're talking about. So what do you have to do? What types of changes will give you a physiologically appropriate fitness lifestyle? Here's always my recommendation.

One, every day you need to lift heavy things. And I'm using that. That's a well-known phrase. I'm using it so much generically. But what I mean by that is every day, even if very brief, even if it's just three minutes, the major muscle groups in your body need to get strained intensely. A way to tell your body, yeah, we have to do things occasionally that use our muscles. Our muscles are still being used.

They don't have to go into some weird unnatural. atrophy mode. I've talked about a lot on the podcast. I do this with a pull-up bar. I think a pull-up just blast every muscle in your upper body. It wakes them up. Like, yeah, we still use these things. I also do some push-ups.

They also do some dips. But like five minutes is fine. Like some intense push-ups, some intense pull-ups. Do some jumping, pliometric-style jumping up onto a box and down. Do some burpees. If you do 50 burpees every day, that's no joke. Every muscle in your body and your lung. for that matter are going to say, yeah, okay, I get it, I get it. We still have a role to play.

Anyways, it's not about time. It's not about achieving a goal. It's not about increasing muscle mass. It's about your muscles stay in their physiologically normal role and do not go into this physiologically abnormal state that modern humans get into where they just never, ever, ever strain their major muscle groups. The other thing I recommend to people is you need to move outside a non-trivial mount every day. Walking is fine. You should do maybe two

non-trivial walks during your day and try to have other opportunities to work outside or get outside or move outside. Do this in all weather. Right? I think sometimes people get this sense of if the weather outside is too different

from a well H-VACD indoor space then I don't want to bother. But actually, I think it's very good from a physiological standpoint for your body to get exposed to different types of weather's right it's really hot right now in the mid-atlantic where i live it's great okay we're going to sweat a ton and it's really cold in january so it's great we're going to be really cold i was walking in the woods this morning it was raining that's fine you know 80 degrees outside you're not going to catch cold so it's raining and it's coming through the leaves

all this stuff is great right your body is tuned to this it's tuned to this is tuned to to be hot, it's tuned to be cold, it's tuned to be humid, it's tuned to be wet when it's raining, it's tuned to then therefore really love that fall or spring day where it's just perfect and you really appreciate it, but it needs to be out there. And again, it's not because there's some magic medicine you get. This is not a forest bathing rant, right? It's not that there is some kind of chemical cascade that occurs if you're outside in the rain that's going to have a neurotropic effect.

It's the absence of this stuff. the absence of these behaviors that our bodies have evolved to expect causes abnormalities. Those abnormalities are bad. So this is really about we're not doing something special or avoiding doing something bad. And so if just even for a little bit every day you move your major muscle groups, and then if every day you get outside multiple occasions do at least 10,000 steps outside all weather, you're in the normal operating procedure. And it's going to feel a lot better than the, you know, look, I don't use my muscles.

I rarely go outside. Then your body shuts down, starts to atrophy. You get the brain fog. You get the fatigue. You get the mood disorders. Not good. The final thing I would add

is not fitness, but it's related, is at least during the day when you're working, eat real food. Stuff that your great-grandmother would have known about. Stuff does not very processed, mainly plants, not too much. There is a ton of advice out there about eating. A lot of that advice kind of conflicts,

but not really, because ultimately what all that advice delivers is it gets people to be intentional about what and how much they eat and that intentionality actually by itself is really, really positive even if this diet focuses on, I don't know, antioxidants

while this one focuses on large globule triglycerites, you know, whatever. I think all of this sort of, I don't know, uh, nutrition bro stuff. It all kind of works because it gets people thinking really intentional. But I'm saying you don't even have to bother with sticking to a very, very specific school of thought. Just do the Michael Pollan thing. Michael Pollan got it right.

He got it right in the fence of food. Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much. That really, really matters. It incredibly matters what goes into your body is a huge difference on your health and how you feel. And you cannot ignore that. So do those three things, Arpan. And comparatively to the weirdly abnormal way that we live and eat, you are going to feel like you are on some sort of cutting edge side effect-free stimulant.

All right. Good question. All right. We're back to Rubin. It's rare that I do two questions from the same person in one episode, but I liked both of the questions. They both showed up in the same batch of questions I was processing when planning this show. So Rubin, what do you have for us this time?

He asks, how do you keep track of habits slash routines when you're implementing or creating? This is a really good topic. I wrote an article about this years ago that I really wanted to return to this topic. So that's why I'm glad that Ruben asked a question because it gives me an excuse to do so. But in that article, I noted, you know, one of the big ideas on productivity, this idea that comes from David Allen is that open loops create psychological anxiety, and they sap cognitive resources. So if there is some task Alan would tell us that you're committed to doing, but it exists only in your head.

That's bad because it's going to make you a little stressed. It's going to make you a little anxious. And it's going to take away cognitive resources from the work you're trying to do in the moment. And so that's why Allen's whole getting things done system has that tagline, mind like water. and why its subtitle was the art of stress-free productivity. The stress he was eliminating was you're going to get things that exist only in your mind out of your mind.

You don't have to worry about him. You just have to execute. So it's a core idea. Certainly that idea is well integrated into my capture, configure, control philosophy of professional productivity. But here's the thing in that that article I wrote years ago pointed out,

your productivity systems themselves kind of our open loops. You have some sort of commitment that I use this notebook and I check things this often and I do my shutdowns here and I time block plan. But that's all in your head. Now, this ultimately works out. Like I think most people, they get used to a particular routine and they kind of execute that routine and they get kind of used to it.

But I don't know. For me, that's a source of stress. It's like my productivity itself is squashing open loops from my work. itself is an open loop because it exists only in my head and I worry about forgetting it and I worry about having to try to keep track of it. And so I introduced this concept that I called rooted productivity. I said there has to be one place. Like the only commitment you need to make is that there is one place, a directory on your computer. Or for a while I would have in my desk drawer, I would have this information printed in a clear plastic sleeve. There is one place that

you have to remember. And your only commitment is that place has written down all of my other commitments. So the core commitments by which you live your life, by which you try to form a deep life, are all written down in one place. So they're in a document in a directory or they're printed on a sheet of paper, in a clear plastic protector in your drawer, wherever. But all you have to remember is that's where I store it. And I follow what's on that piece of paper.

I follow what's in that document. And then on a regular basis, okay, now you know where to go to check what your commitments are. And you don't have to remember all of your systems, all of your routines, all of your metrics. You don't have to remember that. All you have to remember is look in that drawer, look in that directory. So you have one place for that gets stored. And your only commitment you have to have is I know where it is and I review it regularly. And then that's it.

And then you can have peace and then you can have quiet in your mind. Your mind is not going to sit there. And maybe again, I don't know, Rubin, you might not have this problem. I do. I get very stressed out about things. I think I read Allen at a formative age too early. So I get very stressed out about things that I think I'm just keeping track of just in my head. And this solves that problem.

You have the one place and you check it regularly. It also gives you the advantage of you're not going to forget things, but also you have some clarity. If you're doing this regular review, you're much more likely to optimize. You're much more likely to say, you know, I've been reading over this every week. and I have this thing in here I say I do where I keep track of X in this notebook and I really never do that and I think that's a bad idea

well now you're seen in black and white and you can take it off the page you can replace it, you can try to put something better in there. I just think a lot good happens where you have written down in one place like these are the systems I use to try to manage my personal and professional life.

Here it is. Rooted productivity. Now as I mentioned when I wrote that original article I used to have this printed. It had to fit on one page, one side. I had to be brief. I couldn't have too many systems.

You've got to be parsimonious here. And I put in a clear plastic binders in my desk. Now I use, I have a Google Doc. I use, I have a shared document in a directory. The directory is labeled Core. And that's where I keep it. I actually split it into three documents now, but the place is that directory.

And I go to that directory every week. I do it on Friday, Friday night. You know, on the 7th day. You shall rest Shabbat, right? Okay, this is, this is, there's a sort of theological background to this particular timing. And I read over those documents. And I have a memorized, I feel like, but I read over those documents. And it clears off my brain.

So what are those documents? Well, not to get in too much detail. I have one that essentially is capturing like my fundamental values. One that is, here's the game plan for work. And one that is, here's the game plan for life outside of work. So it's like, here's my. systems here's what I do and then I also have some other things in there like here's my plan blah blah I used those same documents to go beyond just my fundamental systems to have here's my fundamental

plan here's my fundamental plan like what I'm at here's my quarterly plan and here's my vision that quarterly plan is trying to push me towards for work here's my vision and that quarterly plan for life outside of work and both these plans are informed by the sinner document which is here are my fundamental values and I look at that every week that's where it is it's not in my head I'm not going to forget. It lets me sleep easy at night. That directory is my route for my approach to living in a deep life. You should do something similar.

Ruben, it can be electronic. It can be on paper. I think you might find that not only you feel better when you just know it's all written down and you are going to review it regularly, but when you see those things regularly, the amount of tweaking and optimizations you might do that might otherwise be ignored if you just roughly speaking had routine.

that you roughly followed and didn't think much about. So anyways, Rubin, I included that question because I think rooted productivity is a key concept, and I'm glad I got a chance to revisit that important idea. Okay, Melissa asks, how can I separate work and leisure when I am working from home? That's a good question.

We tackle this some similar questions in the habit tune-up mini-episode, but I like having the idea or the opportunity, rather, of hitting this topic pretty cleanly in the main episode here. So Melissa, I have two things to say. One, clarity and scheduling is really going to help. This is why if you are doing something like time block planning, you'll have a real advantage in this area because that time block plans can be very clear.

You're working during these hours. Here's what you're doing. This is when your day is done. So at least you have a psychological separation between your work day and your time after work, even if the space hasn't changed, even if you're in the same living room working and you turn over and turn on the TV after work is done in the same living room, having that clarity as opposed to just I'm kind of working at some point.

I'm kind of not. Couple that with a clear shutdown routine. The clear shutdown routine, when you clear out all of the open loops, just like we were talking about with Rubin. All right. Is there anything in my inbox? I look at my plan. Let me look at my time block plan.

Let me make sure that I have an idea. of what's happening tomorrow. Am I all set? Is there anything I'm missing? Anything I need to be worried about? No. Great. Let me look around furatively.

Make sure that there's no one around who can hear me. And then I'm going to say very quietly, schedule shutdown confirmed. And then later in the evening, if I get stressed, like, oh, maybe I miss something. I should go back on my computer. I should check my email. What if there's something there? You say, no, I would not have said that ridiculous phrase if I had not actually gone through my shutdown process.

And my shutdown process assures me that I'm all set for the night. So have a clear schedule. Use something like time block planning. If you're working from home, having a shutdown ritual has never been more important. And you are going to get psychological transitions, even if the physical space doesn't change. And Melissa, the other thing I want to say, this is the point I made on my mini episode is also, if you're working from home right now, get outside your home as much as possible. Both for work and for leisure. So I talked about that episode, go outside to work.

work in different places. Do what we called adventure working in that episode. Bring your hotspot and your laptop into the woods. Connect your laptop and do two hours of work by a stream. Go to parks. Go to outdoor cafes. You know, you could be adventurous or you can be surreptitious here. Which I think actually kind of helps.

Having the adventure or some of the stealthiness can actually kind of help. Like, for example, I'm just thinking off the top of my head, but I'm in Washington, D.C. The National Gallery is open. Beautiful building with these rooms. It's galleries if you've never been there. Classical galleries off of main hallways dedicated to certain types of art. Now, you have to get time tickets, right? So they're keeping the capacity low.

There's not that many people in there at any one time. And you have a certain amount of time you can be in there. I'm just thinking, soft top of my head. Go to the National Gallery. And you go to one of these, you go to, you're sitting alone because there's, I mean, it's very rare to have so few people in the gallery, but now because of the timed entry there is, you're alone in an exhibit room surrounded by, you know, Friedrich Church paintings. And you bring out your notebook and you try to solve that, that strategy issue.

You try to make progress on that, make progress on that proof. Like, what I'm trying to say here is that the more you can get out of your heart, house, the more you can change your context to better if you're in a situation where your house is the main place you're working and your house is the main place you do leisure. Same thing with, you know, time outside of work. Go do things, get out of the house, get outside, spend less time in the house. Now, I think that's common sense. The point I want to make those, I think for, I'm picking this up and it's very binary, very binary. I just think it's interesting. I'm not an expert on this. I'm not a sociologist and I'm not an epidemiologist, but I've noticed there's a very binary split,

feel like in the readers and listeners I'm hearing from, where there are some who are still in a shelter in place lockdown mentality, regardless of how things have actually changed in their state, regardless of what the current regulations are, regardless of whatever the current medical indicators tell them in their mind, it is leaving the house is bad, doing anything outside of the house is bad. It's a risk for yourself and you're letting down your neighbors or something like this. And it's a low-grade agoraphobia. Not good, especially if you're working from home and you do your leisure in home and you have your kids in home. That's not good. There are actually very few places, at least at the time of this recording, there's actually very few places in the world

right now that have something like a shelter-in-place lockdown. I think in the United States, there's maybe just one place, some parts of Hawaii. So all I'm saying is, uh, I want to knock you out of that mindset. You can go outside. Get out of your house. As I joked in the episode, look, you don't need caveats for me to like, don't go do terribly unsafe things. The joke in that episode was, you know, you don't need me to tell you to not go down to the underground rave being held an abandoned warehouse down by the docks. Yes, that would be very unsafe.

But you can walk around your neighborhood. You can go to the woods. In most places, you'll be absolutely fine, you know, at a cafe. you'd be fine in the National Gallery, etc. So if even this discussion is making you uncomfortable, then probably you need to take a bit of a break. I mean this seriously from news, from watching TV, and for sure from social media,

I am 100% convinced that when we look back at this time from a techno-sociological perspective, let's say five or six years from now, we are going to see that there were these ways in which the current modes and technologies with which we community, and spread information probably amplified certain psychological distresses that they didn't need to exist. So if you are stuck at home, if the walls are closing in on you, take a pause, disconnect a little bit from the doom. You know, it doesn't need the doom.

You being plugged into CNN every day is not holding the doom at bay. It's not going to make a difference. If you take a break for a week, it's not like the doom is going to suddenly leave Mount Mordor. I mean, look, the bad stuff is going to happen. It's bad. It's not great. But you can take a break for a little bit and take a breather and get away from the distraction and calm down your emotions and spend some more time out of the house. And then it's not going to seem so terrible.

So that's my advice, right? So just to summarize, have clear schedules, do clear shutdowns. This will give you a psychological transition from work to non-work. And then my second advice is to get out of your house as much as possible, both for work and, for non-work. What you do outside of the house, just select a variety of activities from wherever you are comfortable,

wherever you are comfortable on that scale that we're all contemplating these days and adjusting every day, where you have on one end of the scale, standing on your stoop, yelling, stay safe as lot as you can at everyone who drives by, or on the other end of the scale,

you're down at the abandoned warehouse at the docks doing DJing an underground rave. It's a wide scale. Find where you're comfortable. But the key thing is here is the walls will close in on you if you do not get out of them. Be willing to be creative. Be willing to be unusual.

Be willing to do work in a way you never thought about working. You've never thought about bringing a hot spot into the woods. But why the hell not? Maybe the thought of doing, you know, Zumba in the park would have normally embarrassed you, but these are not normal times. Like whatever. Be willing to have a lot of variety to just get out of your house. and to keep that psychological diversity going on,

that you're in new situations, you are in new places. I think it's going to make a big difference. We want to avoid accidentally inducing unforced, unnecessary states of psychological distress. And I think that'll help. I hope that's useful, Melissa. All right, well, this is about as good a place as any to wrap up this week's episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

So thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. If you want to submit your own, sign up for my mailing list at Calnewport.com. If you want to help this movement grow, leave a rating of review for the podcast. And until next time, as always, stay deep.