Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 231: Fight Burnout with Work Cycles

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDEEP DIVE:  Work Cycles [6:57]- Should I leave my relaxing job to make more money? [33:54]- Is there a need for deep work retreats? [45:59]- How do I find time to work deeply when I’m busy? [53:07]Case Study: On Walking and Remote Work [57:25]- Can Cal explain more about the “celebration” bucket? [1:02:09]SOMETHING INTERESTING: - Deep work cafe [1:10:28]cbsnews.com/news/manuscript-cafe-in-tokyo-serves-an-antidote-to-writers-block/- Gloria Mark’s new book [1:12:50]amazon.com/Attention-Span-Finding-Fighting-Distraction/dp/1335449418Links:basecamp.com/handbook/09-how-we-workbluemountaincenter.org/life-at-bmccnn.com/travel/article/amtrak-free-residency/index.htmlmyfranciscan.org/visit/hermitage/Thanks to our Sponsors:80000hours.org/deepblinkist.com/deepladderlife.com/deepzocdoc.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. The show about living and working deeply in a world increasingly beset by distraction. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as normal by my producer, Jesse. So, Jesse, it's official. As of two days before the recording of this episode, I submitted my manuscript for my new book, slow productivity to my publisher. For the last two days, I have had no writing to do. No morning writing sessions.

No, trying to get my edits in. No, where is my hours? I got to get my hours. I am on a break from writing temporarily. That manuscript has been submitted. So what's temporarily I mean? Well, like another like half a day. All right.

If I'm going to be honest, we're going to be honest about this. The day after I submitted the manuscript, I had a phone call with my editor. or at the New Yorker and we were already planning out the next piece, which I've started on. But I'm free from the, the thing about book writing is to make my schedule, because I had to do this in about six months every day mattered. So there was that constant pressure. You don't have that constant pressure if you're working on one article because you might be in a

phase where you're researching it. You're like, yeah, I'm waiting to hear back from some people. I'm reading about it. I'm thinking about it. And then three days you'll just write it. A book is every single day because you got a lot. you have to build up. Now, submission, for those who don't know how the book, nonfiction book publishing process works, there's a lot of steps. So submission is actually not that important

of an official step. From a contractual perspective, the thing that matters is acceptance of the manuscript. That happens after back and forth editing. So submission, you know, for some people that might be like me, here's the whole thing. But, you know, you could be submitting things along the way. you could have worked with your editor to finish chapter one and then worked with them the finish chapter two. There's no real, the contract says nothing about that. What matters is the acceptance of the manuscript. And that's after all editing has happened and everyone's pretty happy with it.

There's actually typically advanced money tied to when the manuscript's accepted. And then after that, you shift into the production phase. So now a whole different set of editors get involved. And this is where you get things like the copy editing followed by the production editing. You start carrying about commas. You start carrying about the proper capital. of titles, etc. Like that.

So it's a really long process, but getting a full version of the manuscript done is for the writer psychologically speaking of a big milestone. So I'm glad to be, I'm glad to be past that milestone. And I really am going to try to slow down this semester. So when do you start your next book? Because I know you're under a contract. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm under contract for two.

TBD. So we have to figure out that timing. but I just want to take a break from even thinking about that. Yeah, I guess I just keep on thinking. I think I was listening to a holiday interview with Tyler Cohen, and he was talking about how he's always writing a book. And I just figured, I just for some reason, was thinking that's what you're going to be doing now. I mean, I will more or less, but I'm trying to take a few months off.

Okay. To me, so this is, and it's going to bring us back to the theme of today's episode. Now, for me, taking time off means, you know, two. jobs instead of four or something like that. But I see this as this a wonderfully relaxing period coming up because I'm going to be just like a normal professor for a while. You know, I've got my classes. I'm teaching two classes this semester.

I'm teaching. I'm dealing with students. I plan to have at any one time one academic article and maybe one New Yorker article sort of in the hopper rotating back and forth. But that's really different than having a book you're trying to get done because if you do nothing on Wednesday. Not a big deal. You know what I mean?

It's, yeah, but maybe I'm, I'm thinking about this. I'm working on proofs for this and, oh, now I'm going to write a draft of this. So it's just like normal load. It's like a normal professor life for a while, which to me seems like it's going to be wonderfully relaxing. We'll see if that actually works. Then my plan is as the semester begins to wind down, then I'll wind up. I'll wind up the new book.

I think at the very least I want to get past manuscript acceptance for the current book before I'm doing anything too serious. for the next because I don't want to, I don't want to mix those two worlds together. Once we're in production for the current book, then maybe I can actually start working in earnest. So we'll see how that goes. That does, however, bring us to the deep question I want to tackle in today's episode, right? So I'm interested in this idea of temporarily slowing down on a regular basis as a strategy for achieving sustainability in your career, especially if you have an ambitious or elite knowledge work career. How do we make that sustainable? How do we make that something that is

deep in the long run? So that's the deep question I want to tackle today. How do I avoid working all out all the time? So here's how we're going to tackle this in today's episode. We're going to start with a deep dive on a topic very relevant to what we're talking about to the deep question the show is all about. After the deep dive, we'll go on and do some listener questions. I've pulled questions that are all related one way or to the other to this general theme of trying to slow down balancing relaxation with work. So how do you get that back and forth balance going?

They're all related one way or the other so we can take these ideas out for a spin with real issues. I also have a case study in there of someone who has found sort of a nice way to get that balance into their lives. And then we'll end this episode as I like to whenever possible discussing something interesting. All right. That sounds like a plan. That sounds good, Jesse. Sounds great.

You know what we've forgotten to do and I feel bad about this? Books. Yeah. We keep forgetting to talk about the books I read in December. Yeah. We will do that soon, folks. That's just me. I actually had it on my calendar.

I had on my calendar bring in the books for today's episodes. But I'll tell you what happened. a school event got added for one of my kids at the last minute. So I was at that school event. That's why I'm a little late today. And that went right into a two-hour meeting that went right into me finishing my prep and coming over here. So if I get knocked off my routine at all,

the whole house of cards begins to fall because I'm scrambling to get to my kid's school, which means I'm not building my time block plan properly. It all falls apart with just a little bit of a little bit of an obligatory wind right there. Yeah, we'll get in the book. So we'll get them in. We'll get them in. I read some good ones. All right. Let's do a deep dive. I want to talk about the topic of work cycles. In order to get to this topic, let me back up a little bit and set the stage. So what's the issue that this strategy is going to try to solve? Well, I want to pull a quote from a New Yorker piece I wrote a few months ago. We've talked about it on the show before.

This was the New Yorker piece where I went back and said, what does the researcher, the research about work in our deep history. So we're talking about the Paleolithic period, roughly 300,000 years, 300,000 years where homo sapiens were anatomically modern, but we were living pre-agricultural, mainly hunter-gatherer lives. So the longest period of our species' existence, what did work mean then? And the whole point of that essay is, you'll probably recall, is that I then compared that to modern knowledge work looking for places where there was a real

discrepancy and seeing these might be sources of friction where what we're doing today is not meshing with the wiring that was set in the place over many years in the past. So in that article, one of the particular topics I looked at was the pace of work. And here's a quote from a paper written by Mark Dybul, among others, he was a lead author that was comparing a extant hunter-gatherer tribe's work rhythms to a nearby tribe that was still, I shouldn't say tribe. I was sorry, they said, that's not the word to use I learned. Community. Community.

So this is from a research paper that came into nature about they were studying the work rhythms of a largely hunting and gathering community compared to a nearby community that was agricultural. And here's what was said in the article. The pace of the forager schedule was more varied with breaks interspersed throughout their daily efforts. Hunting trips required a long hike through the forest, you'd be out all day, but you'd have breaks, Diabal told me. With something like fishing, there are spikes, ups and downs. Only a small percent of their time is spent actually fishing. And the conclusion I made from that is

it's a fair guess that through most of our species history, work pace was incredibly varied. Intense periods, followed by relaxed periods at all sorts of different scales. We're out hunting, but the sun is hot and we're going to rest for three hours until it gets a little less. We're spearfishing like the adjta people that were being studying this particular paper, but there's going to be long periods. How long can we actually be underwater holding our breath? There's long periods where we're just resting in the boat. Now, if we look at the history of work, we can understand that in part as a long march away

from this widely varied work pace. So as we shifted from the paleolithic to the Neolithic, So as we had the introduction of agriculture, and now we're talking between 15 to 10,000 years ago, we saw the first shift. We began to get during the planting and harvesting seasons, days of continual effort without break. So if it is October and you're trying to get that harvest in,

you're not taking long naps during the day. Those are long days, sun up to sun down. However, in the early Neolithic, through almost up to the modern period, you had months that were incredibly relaxed, lower-paced work versus months that were more intense. We still had a seasonality at the literal scale of seasons. In January, there is not much to do,

whereas in October you might have been really busy. All right, now let's fast forward all the way to the rise of factory work followed by factory-style office work, by which I mean nine to five, you show up like you would to a factory. there we got the consistently hard days year round. There is no, oh, January, you don't work much, but October you work more. No, no, you're working all day long without long breaks every week of the year. But, you know, whatever, a vacation exception in there somewhere or the other.

We still had, however, clear shutdowns. So if you worked at Ford building cars, that's hard work from when you start to when you finish, there is no seasons that are less hard work. But when you go home, there is nothing for you to do. There's no work related to building model T's that you can bring back to your house and continue doing. And this was true, a course of early office style or factory style office work as well.

When you weren't at your desk where your papers were and whatever, your assistant was and a typing pool was. When you weren't at your desk, there was very little work you could actually do. So you had at least clear shutdowns within the day binary, work, non-work. Finally, we get to where we are today, which is office work in the age of computer networks, and now work is always available.

You always have access to work. There's always more work for you to do. It's being delivered via email, it's being delivered via Slack. The tools you need to actually make progress on this work are with you. They're mobile. They're with you at home. They're with you on vacation. They're with you when you're in the car.

So work is now always available. This is where we're really getting into trouble because we've created an environment where work is always available. And then we combined it with what we talk about often on this show as the unstructured approach to productivity, unstructured productivity, where we say in knowledge work, we don't have a particular system we use for assigning work or tracking work or keeping track of who's working on what or figuring out when you're going to work on things. It's just up to you. productivity is personal, just do what you think is useful for the company. We're not going to tell you how to do your work. This combination, work is always available.

You're always able to do work. And there's no real structure to how work gets done. It's just left up to you, hey, do what you're going to do. This has led to a much increased rate of just continual effort. Now, it's not that we work every waking hours. we do instead. And again, we talk about this often. What we do instead in this combination of always available work and unstructured productivity is that we just let stuff pile up until we are so stressed from the work that we feel like we have psychological cover to say no to what comes next.

So we just push ourselves to we're overloaded. And that gives us justification to say, well, this is why I'm stopping because I'm exhausted. You know, I'm up late working. And this is why I feel okay stopping until the next morning because I already work till two in the morning. So we let our own sense of overload and stress be the governor. That ensures, by definition, that we're always working too much. Unstructured productivity, always available work. So really what we have here is a collision of two different types of factors. A cultural factor, unstructured productivity, and a technological factor. Always available work. That's a technological thing. unstructured productivity, that's a cultural thing.

I'm always interested where technological forces hit cultural forces. Unexpected outcomes often arise, and this is one. Knowledge workers are often now in the state of always working too much. This is a recipe for burnout. You can only sustain that so long. Some people get the burnout faster than others. There's different reactions to the stress of this overwork, but it's not good. It's not good.

So what do we do about this? But we have to find ways to structure productivity more to get us away from the setting where we just sort of go at it until we're so stressed we feel like we have covered to say no. There is many different ways to solve this problem. We might even want to say there's many different things you can do to help make progress on this problem. I want to talk about one particular strategy today that I came across when I was writing the book I'm working on now on slow productivity and I wanted to share it with you.

So I'm actually going to jump over now on the screen for those who are watching this at YouTube at YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. This is episode 231. For those who are watching on YouTube, you will see this on your screen, but I'll also narrate it for those who are just listening. What I have loaded up here is the Chapter 9 of the Base Camp Employee Handbook. So Basecamp is a software development, product development tech company. It's co-founded. You may know. It's co-founder and CEO, Jason Freed. Him and I did an event together when I launched my last book, A World Without Email. So we've crossed paths a few times. They're very innovative in thinking about work. So Jason, the co-founder, has co-authored multiple books about rethinking knowledge work, including rework and one that's called work doesn't have to be this way. So it's a company in which the principles do a lot of thinking about how can we make work better, even if it requires a radical. changes. So their handbook is actually itself a fascinating business advice read because you're

exposed to all of these experiments they're trying. Well, in chapter nine of this handbook, and it's what I have loaded on the screen now, they talk about cycles. Now, I'm going to read from the handbook right now. We work in six to eight week cycles at Basecamp. There are typically six cycles to a year. Two or eight week cycles during summer hours, and the rest are six week cycles. This fixed cadence serves to give us an internal sense of urgency, work as a scope hammer to keep projects from ballooning, and provide a regular interval to decide what we're working on. The idea is not that everything we ever decide to work on has to take six to eight weeks or can be completing that time, but rather that we think about how we can break big projects into smaller ones

that can be done in that amount of time, and that we bundle smaller things into a presentable scope of work that can be discussed. All right, now I'm going to skip forward a little bit. This is what I like about the cycle strategy, this next section called cool down. In between each cycle, we spend two weeks cooling down. That's the time to deal with bugs or smaller issues that come up, write up what we worked on, and figure out what we should tackle next. It's sometimes tempting to simply extend the cycles into the cool down period to fit in more work, but the goal is to resist this temptation.

I think this is a brilliant strategy. it matches the natural rhythm of work for which human beings are better suited. So this idea of work intensely for a while, then cool down for a couple weeks. Okay, let's just, everyone chill, let's just hammer out some final bugs and kind of have some brainstorming type meetings about what comes next. We wake up, we come to work a little late. We're not staying late. The inbox is reasonable. And then once that two weeks is over, let's get after it again.

okay, now we speed back up and we're working urgently on something we're all in, then we cool down again. That general pattern, on off, on off is very effective. It is a much more sustainable way of having a profession where you have to create value using only what's happening in between your ears from your brain. It's a much sustainable way to create value with your brain than what most people do, which is keep saying yes until you're so stressed that you feel like you have covered to say no and hope you don't burn out too. soon. So I really like this cycle idea. There's a couple different ways that you could actually

implement this. If you're running a team or running a company, you could do what Base Camp did. This is how we actually operate. You could make this your culture. I don't care what lengths do you do other than the cool downs need to be non-trivial longer than a day. But you could say this is how we do it. It's one month on, one month off. A semester

on, then we take a month that's a little more relaxed, three months, three weeks. However you want to do it, but having a regular rhythm of on off, on off. is something that you should consider. Now, I think the managers out there are saying, wait a second, think about all of the wasted productivity during the cool down period.

We're going to be getting that much less work done. My response to this is the same response base camp would have, which is nonsense. The amount of high-quality work you get done during the intense period of the cycles is going to add up to much more quality results if you balance those with cool downs, then if you instead just try to push through all out all year round.

Because what happens if you just try to push all out all year round, that energy flags? And the amount of effort you're doing six months into the year is a lot worse than it was earlier, a lot worse than it would be if you actually had regular cool down peers. You're going to get more done. It's going to be higher quality. People aren't going to burn out.

Now, what if you don't have control of a team? What if you don't run your own company? do this stealthily on your own. Internally, without telling other people, I have cycles. And during this bit of the cycle, I'm all on, this week or this two weeks, I'm pulling back. You can do this without having to make any declarations, without having to get anything signed off on by a boss without really attracting that much attention. It's just a matter of making your weekly plans sparse during the cool down periods. Just don't put much stuff into those weekly plans.

Being really careful about scheduling things during cool down periods. To the degree you can get away with this without it being notable, punt. Well, yeah, I was talking a, I'm not really available that week but the next week or let's get back to this, you know, after the break. So you sort of move things around. And for the things that you have to schedule during the cool down period, have multiple days that are, meeting free. Don't tell anyone you're doing this. But just for that two weeks, it's like, well, Tuesday and Thursday you're not offering up. So you have multiple days in these cool down weeks where you have no Zoom and no calls and no meetings. Be careful about your larger projects. If you have a project that's

going to end, then another one's going to start, don't start that one during a cool down period. It's strategic about when you bring things on. So these stealth cycles with stealth cool down periods can be just as effective as working out a company like Basecamp that has this built right into their handbook. Now, what's going to happen is, not only is this going to make your work more sustainable, I think you are going to become more valued in your company because the intensity of your intense periods is better.

The quality of what you produce is better when you know that cool down is coming and you get the benefit of that cool down. So what are your managers going to notice? Not that, you know, I really was crunching the numbers. And statistically speaking, in these two weeks out of the last six, it seemed to me that Cal was not scheduling meetings on Tuesdays as much as he did during the other ones. We need to do something about this. That's not what they're going to notice.

What they're going to notice is your peaks. Wow. Like, he really good. This was great. Like, this thing he produced, you know, last month was very good. This is someone that we really value. So I'm a big believer in cycles, whether they be institutionalized or happy and socialized. are happening surreptitiously.

It is one way among many, I think, to feed into this natural inclination we have for up and down. We're chasing the gazelle. Now we're taking a nap under the sun. This natural seasonality on all sorts of scales is useful. Cycles gives us this on the scale of weeks. So, you know what, Jesse, I take it for granted. As a professor, we naturally have these type of cycles on that scale built in because semester's end. You know, and we know this in academia.

We're in between semesters. Everyone is taking a beat. You don't schedule meetings. You don't expect people to respond to emails. And then it rams back up again. And then you get the biggest cycle of all, which is summer. And then summer is, so it's great. That rhythm works well.

I take it for granted. But seeing Basecamp's handbook help me understand this idea that instead of just saying, too bad you're not a professor, like a lot of people could have something similar in a word. working life. It just takes a little effort. I know that you coin a lot of terms. Did you come up with the term unstructured productivity? I think so. It's a good term. Yeah, we need a glossary. Yeah, we do need a call glossary. I invent, I invent terms. Yeah, frequently. Yeah, no, you're very good at it. Some sticks, some don't, but you might have to do a whole article on unstructured productivity. That's good. Yeah, you know, it's kind of an evolution. It's an evolution of my thinking that shows up a lot more

in my book's low productivity because I, not to give too much of the book away now, there's so much to talk about when the time comes. But I really get an upfront, a deep history of productivity and how things sort of spun off their axis and knowledge work, because you have to set up, like what is the issue we're trying to solve? And that's a big deal. I think in knowledge work, there's a lot of people who correctly have the instinct that something is going wrong with productivity and knowledge work. Like this push to do more, it's not generating more, it's not sustainable, it's stressing us out.

But they're jumping past the what's going on to let me just start blasting at enemies because that's the whole tone I think of online discourse right now. So it's, you know, mustache twisting managers and capitalism and these sort of vague cultures of overwork. It's all very vague. It's just so that you can kind of attack it. And I am my book. I'm like, yeah, great.

but let's actually like understand like where do these definitely where's our notions of productivity come from and unstructured productivity plays a big role in that storyline. The rise of unstructured productivity. I've been developing this whole framework which you'll hear more about in the future about because, you know, I'm a tech guy, how unstructured productivity kind of worked wasn't great. And then you get computers. It's body blow number one. Then you get networks, body blow number two. And the whole thing collapses. So it's this cultural idea of God, I don't even know what productivity means in knowledge work.

Let's just leave it up to the individual. That was okay in like 1977. You get to like 1997 and the whole thing falls apart. And I think we're still on the mat right now trying to figure out what to do about it. And so there's a whole interesting thing out there. But it's an evolution because in my last book I talked specifically about one implication of unstructured productivity is the hyperactive hive mind. So if productivity is unstructured, collaboration in particular is going to be ad hoc and back and forth with messages on Slack and email. And so I wrote that whole book, World Without Email, about just collaboration in the context of unstructured productivity is a brain melter.

It's a killer of actually being able to get things done and it makes us all miserable. But that's just one issue of unstructured productivity. So in my writing for the New Yorker and in this book, the bigger issue in my mind is not just, collaboration goes awry, but it's workload. This, like, you're always working. There's always more work to do. There's performativity. You're trying to signal value through low value actions, through busyness.

Like, this is the bigger, broader issue. And that's the evolution of my thinking. It's like unstructured productivity. You can't understand any complaint about modern knowledge work without starting with that issue. It's really cool. That's really well explained, too. All right.

So what I want to do is I have a collection of questions that are all roughly speaking about this tension between business and relaxation, getting after it and trying to recharge. First, let me mention a sponsor that helps make this show possible. That is my friends at 80,000 hours. 80,000 hours is a nonprofit that aims to help people have a positive impact with their career. If you're wondering where that number comes from, let's do a little math. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years of work, you get the 80,000. Now, when I say these are my friends, I didn't mean that in the informal colloquial sense of,

oh, it's people that work with us. I've known these guys from the very beginning. Right. So I've known that they're based out of Oxford. When they started this nonprofit, I was working on what became my book so good they can't ignore you, which is a book about career advice that pushes back on this idea that you should just follow your passion. And so we were really sympathetico.

So I know these guys. We talk back and forth. They've written some guides about my work. I've been talking about their work for a long time. So I was really happy to have the opportunity for them to become one of our sponsors because as people I already pitch positively. So here's the idea behind this nonprofit 80,000 hours. It's what you spend the majority of your time doing is working.

So it is your biggest tool you have to make a difference in the world. Now, most people who even bother to think about this question, like, what can I do with my work so that I leave the world a better place? Most people who try to think about this question feel like there's not very many options. I think our normal discourse on this says, like, what? You can become a doctor or go work for a nonprofit, right? Like, we have these really limited options, and that's kind of it. And so we have all this generations of smart kids. Like, I don't want to work for a nonprofit or become a doctor, and then they all become lawyers.

80,000 hours says, let's go deep on this question. How do we help you connect your work, the 80,000 hours you spend work into actually doing good for the world? They've spent at least 10 years now conducting research on this topic. As I mentioned, affiliated with academics at Oxford University. They know that our generation faces issues of historical importance, and they want to help more of us dedicate their 80,000 hours of work to solve them. So what you can do is you can go to their website, 80,000 hours, the number 80,000, followed by the word hours, 80,000 hours.org slash deep. And they will send you a free copy of their in-depth career guide.

So this will just get you started on the 80,000 hours way of thinking about work. In it, you will learn about what makes for a high-impact career. You will get new ideas for impactful paths. It will also help you make a plan based on what you. you learned, a plan that will help you put those ideas into action. So in addition to getting that guide, which will get you started, it will sign you up for their newsletter, which is going to give you regular updates on their research and tell you about high impact job opportunities.

More recently, they've also started a podcast, which is fantastic. They've had a lot of great guest on there. I mean, I'm just looking at some of their recent topics here. So they had, for example, a recent podcast on successful careers, even if you have depression, anxiety, or imposter order. They had David Chalmers on. So if you know anything about AI or ethics, you know David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness. So you get this mix of practicality and big think. They also have a job board at 80,000 hours.org, helping you find high impact jobs.

So look, if you want to do something to make the world a better place, your job is to be a better place, your job is to be. best way to do it. And going to 80,000 hours.org slash deep is how to get started figuring out how to inject impact into your working life. So go to 80,000 hours. org slash deep to start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling, and help solve on the world's most pressing problems. It's really full circle, Jesse.

I mean, I knew those guys years ago. Yeah. I had my newsletter, and they were just getting started. And that was kind of it, you know. And now full circle, we're a podcast. I could advertise them. It's cool. I enjoy that.

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You need to see a dentist. your leg hurts, you need to see a doctor. You don't have a doctor. And you're like, what do I do next? It's classic adulting for all of the young ones out there. Or for those of us, like my age, who have been up to their ears and kids and are like, I haven't had time to think about getting a cardiologist. How do I do that?

What do you do? And most people, Google or just start texting friends, do you have a doctor that you can recommend? This is a problem that would be well solved by an app. And that is what Zoc Doc does. it is the only free app that lets you find and book doctors who are patient reviews, take your insurance, and are available when you need them. So you can immediately find, okay, I need a dentist.

Where are there dentists is nearby that take my insurance and are looking for new patients, and let me sign up. Oh wait, maybe before I sign up, I want to see, like, do I like this dentist? Well, here are real reviews. Independent service, Doc, here's real reviews from real patients. Ah, they really like her. All right, and she's available and she takes my insurance. done, you get the tooth pain taken care of.

So it's one of these ideas that just makes sense, and ZocDoc does it well. As I've mentioned before, I have two different health care providers right now where they use ZocDoc to handle all of their paperwork. So when I'm going in, I can just do it online before I go in. I can fill out whatever new forms they need. Click a button.

I love it. So ZocDocke plays a big role in my life as well. So go to Zocococ.com slash deep and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then find a book a top-rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. That's ZOCDOC.com slash deep. Zockdoch.com slash deep.

What was it? Last time we figured out, Jesse, we're trying to figure out how can we get more ox into the URL. What was our winner? Our winner was if Dwayne Johnson did a podcast about building berths for your boats. And so he had the promo code. His vanity URL would be Rockstock to give Zocococcom rockstock slash rockstock. I think that was the best we got to.

We need one more in there. One more in there. But anyways, Zock.com. All right, let's do some questions. As mentioned, these are all roughly speaking about the theme of this week's episode, which is how do I stop working all out all the time? All right, Jesse. What do we have is our first question here?

We've got some good questions here. First is from Fork in the Road. I am currently working in higher education and administration at Aurora University. My lifestyle is slow and I have a lot of free time, which I enjoy. However, my income is quite low. Many of my peers with similar degrees have moved on to data science or software engineering, live in big cities and have fast-paced lives. They are definitely pros and cons of both lifestyles,

and I don't really see a good way of choosing. Well, first of all, and I think data scientists, I think fast-paced lives. Yeah. They're just slinging hundreds, you know, cocaine all hours of the night. Pulling up in their Kawasaki Ninja motorcycles, slapping five. Data scientists do it in the standard deviation. I don't know. I'm trying to think what's on their shirt.

I'm sort of clever. So here's what I'm doing here, Jesse. This is an inversion, right? So we were talking about people who are working too much and wondering how they can maybe make that more sustainable. Let's invert that with this question. Someone who's not working enough or not working that much at all and wondering if they should be working more, but how do they do that in a way that's not going to overwhelm them?

So how do they get to that mean we're looking for? They're coming out from another direction, but trying to end up in that same place, having the right level of work. So as longtime listeners know, my standard answer to any of these, should I change my job questions, usually comes back to lifestyle-centric career planning.

I say, look, you should have this clear vision of your ideal lifestyle, all aspects of your life, not just work. It should be tangible. You can smell it, taste it, see it, feel it. And then you figure out how do I work backwards from that to make it happen, given whatever opportunity, skills, existing career capital I have in place. And then you sort of build a reasonable plan to get closer to that vision.

This question brings another element into that discussion, which I think is important, which is the notion of an income floor. So lifestyles and lifestyle center career planning are abstracted away from details of this is your particular job. This is your particular income. But we cannot abstract income completely out of these discussions because if your income is below a certain level, there are issues that could arise that will destabilize any aspirational lifestyle goal. there's a stress generation factor that happens. If you feel like you don't have enough discretionary income to handle the things that come up in the normal course of life, it is a constant source of stress.

And it doesn't matter if, yeah, but my house nearby this rural university has a nice yard and it's scenic. And if you're worried about money all the time, that stress is going to outweigh that. Also, if discretionary income is low enough, so many of the different. options you have for actually investing in and fulfilling visions for different areas of your life are going to be cut off to you. I can't take this time off. I can't afford to do this. I don't have the money to buy the mountain bike for my dream of mountain biking. So there's something that I call the income floor, which is important. And that's where you take, and I'm using this term discretionary income. What I really mean by that is your income after fixed expenses.

So now we're trying to normalize for like how much does your house cost, you know, how much, you have to pay tuition for private school for your kids because of where you live. That's the best option, et cetera. So the money you have left over, if that's below a certain floor, which you can conceptually figure out, then a particular lifestyle plan we can think of it as being unsustainable. So it's like you want to say, here's my lifestyle vision. how do I, using my existing opportunities and skills and options, how do I get closer to this lifestyle while staying above my income floor? And we want to throw that into the discussion here forking the road because you said my income is also quite low. So this is actually going to be the crux of what you do next is figuring out does low quite low mean below your income floor? And that's another bit of planning you have to do.

How much money would you need after you pay for your housing expenses, etc? How much discretionary income do you think you would need to feel non-stressed and like you have interesting options and the various things that matter for you in your life? If in your current job you're below that, getting above that income floor is a necessary component of your lifestyle vision that you're trying to move towards. Now, you might find that you're already above it. Yeah, you don't make a ton of money, but where you live is cheap and it's fine. good benefits. You're not really worried about calamitous, whatever health occurrence is.

So you might be fine. Or you might feel that you're close to it. But everything else about your lifestyle where you live is good. Well, that's fine. Now you're just trying to close an income gap. And you can make a plan to do that. I want to move up to this next level in the administration. I'm going to do this thing on the side because I have a data science background

and I'm going to do some side work and we can easily push that above. Or you're going to have to make a change and say, you know what? I'm well below it. There's nothing I can really do here to get above it, so I'm going to have to make a change. The income floor, I think, is really important. If you do make a change, I want to assure you that there is a middle ground between being the administrator in the rural university and big city fast-paced, cliched data scientists doing coke off the stomach of a stripper vision that we all have of you data scientists. there is an in-between ground. And how do you access that?

What is the map you use to find the in-between ground? It's, again, it's this lifestyle-centric career planning augmented with the income floor. If you have software engineering skills, if you have data science skills, you can figure out, okay, I don't need to make all of this money. I need to get above this floor. Oh, you know what? I could go to Boise and work at the tech sector there that's burgeoning. And this is actually a pretty reasonable job, but it gives me above that floor. and it still has some of the aspect I like of rural living over here.

I mean, you have a lot of options, is what I'm saying. There might be remote work options. Well, I could take this remote work job, or I could do contract work. And you know what, if I had five clients doing contract work, I'm above the floor, but I could live wherever I wanted, but the income is better. You have a lot of options. And this is why I always come back to working backwards from your vision is because that's what allows you to navigate the territory of options.

Without that, we fall back on cliches. We fall back on extremes. Without that sort of guidance, we think I either become a lawyer or I become a teacher, right? This is a standard Ivy League graduate thing. Or you think I either move to the big city to be a softer engineer and I have to somehow like afford to live in the Bay Area or I have to stay in a very low income administrator job in this rural county. We think about extremes. We think about cliches if we don't have a specific compass to navigate us through that territory. So lifestyle vision career planning with an income floor as a non-the-grimbing.

negotiable component of wherever you end up, I think you have many more options than you think. You have many more knobs to turn with the degree you have to build that lifestyle than you might at first imagine. Mr. Money Mustache sent out an email kind of like moving, or he was visited San Francisco and talked about some of those issues. He came away from visiting San Francisco saying the lifestyle here is so expensive. Why would you live here? or he came away saying, I'm moving to San Francisco. He came away saying he did some research and he's like, there's still a lot of cool things you can do in the city. The food is actually not that much more expensive if you buy it in a grocery store.

He goes there's a lot of free places you can go and he took pictures of him in the parks and certain places and walking around, not paying for gas, that sort of thing. Here's my, I'm going to give a deep poll here for like really long time denizens of online culture, especially old blog culture. I'm talking early 2000s here. This reminds me of it. Leo Babuda Zen Habitz. Do you know Zen Habits?

No. So this was really, he helped kick off this. So there's this online minimalism movement that really kicked off pre-social media. So these were, when I was getting started, these sites like Zen Habits were a couple years ahead of me. In fact, Leo of Zen Habits actually had a program where you could sign up and he would mentor you as an early blogger and he mentored me for a while and gave me some advice. So I remember being in grad school at MIT in the early 2000s, like 2005, 2006, readings and habits. This is when the minimalist got started a little later, but this was also the time of becoming minimalist and I don't remember

all of them. They all had minimalism in the name, basically. Courtney Carver. I'm trying to think of the different names. Anyways, it was this whole movement about simplifying. And it really was. I wrote about this in my quiet quitting piece for the New Yorker a couple weeks ago about briefly I mentioned for the millennials like us this minimalism movement that arose after 9-11 during the financial crisis of 2008, that whole first decade of the 2000s was really millennials trying to grapple with work and life. And it's when we were moving away from follow your passion. We were the first generation raised on that to trying to figure out how do I put work to work on behalf of what I want my life to be.

But anyways, Leah was one of the original guys. So Zen Habits was about simplifying your life, slowing down. And he lived in Guam, six kids, was in debt and was out of shape and smoking or whatever. And through Zen habits, he began chronicling, got in better shape. He stopped smoking, built up this audience, and wrote a guide. And I forgot even what it was called, but like a PDF guide. and started selling it. And that did really well by 2005 standards, right?

Like today, when you think about someone doing well, we're like, oh, that's great. Like Jordan Harbinger signed a $5 million podcast deal. This was more like, man, I made $70,000 or something, right? But he paid off all of his debts. And he was what made me think about this story based on what you're talking about is they moved to San Francisco. All his six kids, he quit his job. He could make just enough off of this. And they lived really cheaply.

So it reminds me exactly what Mr. Money Mustache was talking about. He wanted to live somewhere interesting. So they moved to a row house in San Francisco. They homeschooled their kids and just went to the parks and to the ocean and just walked around and just loved their whole life was built around just being in an interesting place. So it made me think about that. He was living cheap and made a really cool life. So he's like, if we're going to live cheap, we want to live somewhere that's fascinating. It's in habits.

That guy was awesome. You would read that and you would just be like, man, I got to simplify my life. That's a good move. all the older, I have listeners out there who know what I'm talking about, but that was a cool, a little cool period of our culture. That then morphed in the fire culture

into Mr. Money Mustache, right? So fire was the, fire was the follow-up to the online minimalism movement. So fire was more like a geeky version of that. So the minimalism movement had, you know, like the minimalist and Leo and Courtney and Joshua Becker.

And these guys were, they're kind of cool. It was kind of, they were cooler guys, right? like we're going to just hike with our backpack and and like live simply and Josh and Ryan moved to a cabin for a while. And then we got the new version which Mr. Money Mustache helped kick off. And now it's more geeks who are like I've,

my spreadsheet tells me that if I get a 3.6 return post tax on my, you know, SEP IRA, I'm going to be able to retire. So then there was like this kind of geek version of it, but it was all the same idea. And then the fire movement kind of got shut down because, I mean, it's still around,

but they got super shamed, right? So then they got super shamed of like, you guys. all are privileged and this and that and they all got worried about it and so a lot of them kind of disappeared and I don't know what's going to come next but that's a whole other conversation all right let's do another question here uh Daniel do you think there's a need for a place where people can go for prolonged periods to perform deep work a space close to nature where you have your

dedicated habitat are surrounded by like-minded individuals and have some things taken care for you Daniel these things very much do exist in fact it's one of my great hobbies when I'm feeling stressed out is to track down or luxuriate in examples of exactly these type of settings, places that are designed to help people do deep work in the most scenic or novel possible environment with distractions minimized as much as possible. So these exist all over the place aimed at different people for different situations. I thought I would take advantage of this question to do a little bit of deep geeking, as I like to call it. I pulled up on my tablet here just a few examples of these places among many. So if you're

watching this on YouTube, you can see these pictures, but I'll describe what I'm showing for people who are just listening. All right. So this first example I brought up here, BMC, this is the Blue Mountain Center. This is near Blue Mountain Lake and the Adirondacks. So those who are watching see a beautiful Adirondack lodge. That's logs with ceilings to come down low. that's part of a 1600 acre estate. So here it says life at BMC is centered around our guest work, rejuvenation, and communal life. The atmosphere is informal, cooperative, and curious. People come here to write.

They get away from everything. I know about this particular center because Bill McKibben, one of my icons, my hero, the writer, Bill McKibbin, he went here. I discovered this when I interviewed Bill for a New Yorker column. a year or so ago. I was asking him about how he ended up, because his story, if you don't know it, is that he was a writer, lived in Manhattan, was a writer for the New Yorker living in this small apartment downtown. And it wasn't a super safe area, right? There's definitely a living in a city experience. And he told me about his apartment getting broken into at some point. And there's nothing for them to steal. Like they broke in or like, what am I taking? There's

nothing here. So he was living the city life. And he, he was on track to be an editor at the New Yorker. In fact, Bill Sean had even hinted at the idea that he may maybe even replace him as the editor-in-chief, right? So he was on this fast track, and he quit and moved to a cabin in the Adirondacks. And him and his wife, Susan Halper, who also writes for the New Yorkers still to this day, great writer. They moved up to the Adirondacks, and he wrote a book about nature. It's like, I want to do nature writing. And I'm going to live cheaply. So speaking of minimalism, speaking of fire, his whole thing was, we can live up here,

for almost nothing. So with just book advances and random freelance work, we can support ourselves. And we just live this simple life. And he's still up there today. He moved across the Lake Champlain to Vermont, but same idea. Anyways, why did he move to the Adirondex?

I interviewed him about this. He said, I didn't know anything about the Adirondacks until a year before that quitting event, a friend of his had a spot at the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Lake Mountain, the Adirondex for a multi-week riding retreat. and the friend dropped out and said, hey, Bill, do you want to take my spot? So he just took his spot. It showed up at this place sight unseen.

For those who are watching, I'm showing other aspirational photos here, a lake that the house is looking over, people baking bread. Here's a whole thing about, oh, look at this. Oh, Jesse. Look at this.

Cell phones are not allowed at Blue Mountain Center. I'm loving this place more. If I disappear for a few months and you can't find me, go to the Blue Mountain Center. It's probably going to find me. Here's riders hiking. You see they all have sort of the pasty skin of riders that have been inside too long.

Here they are sitting by a dock. Here is, now, Jesse, you can correct me in my description here. There's a forest, and there's a silhouetted figure. I believe that's Sasquatch. Right? There's a silhouette.

It looks like a bear standing on his hind legs. I mean, do I have that right? Is that just me? It looks like a bear, right? Yeah, it does. Yeah. So, like, downside of Blue Mountain Center, you may be eaten by a saskwatch, but upside there's good bread, no cell phones.

Anyways, that's one example among many. Let me show another quick example here. I love this one. I don't know if they're doing this anymore. The pandemic might have killed it. But for a while, I thought this was really cool. And this is the Amtrak Riders residency. So as a program where as a writer, you apply, you say, I'm stuck on my book.

And what they give you is a birth on a sleeper car for Amtrak, from New York to Portland, Oregon. So a multi-day Amtrak train. I'm showing some photos of this on the screen. And so there's no distractions. You're just in a cross-country Amtrak train, and all you can do is sort of write and think. You're literally stuck on this particular train.

It's quiet the entire time? Quiet the entire time. Quiet a quiet cabin the entire time? Well, you have your own room. You got your own car. Yeah. I just took the Amtrak. I went up to New York real quick for a photo shoot.

It was not in the quiet car. The person next to me, like, I don't, it's not the quiet car. And I get if you have a phone call to make, this person was just straight up watching content on their phone with no-your phones. Just straight up, the volume, like, so I don't know what they're, the video or something like that. Did you move? That's a crowd. Full train. Yeah.

So what are you going to do? I don't mind. I just read. It was nice. All right. One more example to give. This is near us. Most people don't know about this in D.C.

So there's a Franciscan monastery associated with, I think, with Catholic University here in D.C. And they have this, if you're looking on the screen, it's like a teeny house, like a modernist small structure in the woods. This is on the grounds of a monastery right here inside D.C., inside the Beltway, maybe like 20 minutes from where Jesse and are right now. Anyways, you can book time to just go stay in this thing. So it's in the city, but in the woods. They have all this land. It's like in the woods, but in the middle of the city. and they say you can enter into deeper communion with God through prayer and solitude.

It's an urban retreat for one person nestled behind a historic Franciscan monastery of the Holy Land in America. But I'll tell you what, a lot of writers go here. So you can commune with God, but you can also get some writing done. It has one bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and an outdoor deck. And that's it. There's a video about it you can watch. Anyways, people don't know about that, but right here in D.C., one to seven nights. You just write the monks.

They're like, hey, I want to come and do this. And if they approve it, you just in this box, this modernist box with a bed. And you can be like a monk for a while and get writing done. So, Daniel, there are lots of options. And there should be more, but there's a lot of options out there if you're looking to get away, especially if you're a writer or an artist. There are a lot of options. And I think they're cool. All right.

Let's move on. What do we got next, Jesse? All right. Next question is from TJ. How do I find time to work deeply when I'm a busy college student? So, I mean, this is a college student question, but I think it's relevant to everyone. So I don't do, I try not to do student specific questions anymore where it's just relevant to students. But I think actually this issue that is being brought up here by TJ is relevant to more than just students, which is this idea of I am too busy to do deep work.

All right. here's the thing. You have the core work you have to do. So T.J, you're a college student. So there's assignments that have to be done, papers that have to be written, studying that has to be completed for quizzes and exams. That work is your work you need to do. So the question is just how are you going to do it? Now, if you do it in the deep style, which is let me focus without distraction when I'm doing that work,

and when I'm not doing that work, not be doing that work, or you could do it in a shallow style where you mix it in with lots of other things. The deep style will take less time. So I don't really understand the underlying premise of I'm too busy to do deep work if that's actually the most efficient way just from a peer time consumption perspective to get things done. So let's reinterpret this question another way, which is I have too much going on to get my core work done. This is sometimes what people say, I'm going to say I'm too busy to do deep work. What they really mean is I'm too busy. My schedule is too crowded with the shallow to actually make progress.

the core things I need to do in my job, whether it be a college student having to study for a test, or it's, you know, you're working in a business and it's doing your core business strategy, whatever it is. Well, in that case, here's what you do. You take out your calendar, you build an autopilot schedule. This is what I tell students and it works for everyone else. Everything that occurs regularly, I always have to do reading each week. I always have to do a problem set.

You find a time for it this day, this time, week after week, and you block it off on your calendar. So everything regular gets time. And when you get to the beginning of your week, you do a weekly. plan for that week. And if you're if you're having trouble fitting things, do a weekly plan that's very heavy on time allocation. Let me actually find time on my calendar for all the major things I have to get done. You don't always do this in weekly planning in general, but if you're feeling busy and overwhelmed, let's do this for a little while. So now you're placing, okay, I got to work on this term paper, I got to get these notes cleaned up, whatever. Getting that

all in your calendar. And either fits or it doesn't. If it doesn't, if it doesn't, if it doesn't fit, you only have two options. You can make more room by quitting things. So if you're a student, this might mean forget this club. I can't be involved in these six things. If you have another type of job, it might be your project load. I got to leave this committee. I got to get off of this project. I have to postpone this until the summer because it's just a reality, right? You need more time. You got to clear it more time. The second option you have is to get the work you have done more efficiently. So if you're a student, you can start using the more efficient study techniques I talk about, for example, in my book, how to become a straight-day student, or in the archives of my

blog at calnewport.com, you can go back to 2007, 2008, get a lot of articles on it. That makes things take less time. You can take things off your calendar to free up more time. Those are your two options. You have to face the productivity dragon here and figure out what your strategy is going to be. There is no other third option where the work gets done and by just you ignoring it and saying, stop bothering me about things like deep work. I'm just too busy.

So you've got to face the reality of your schedule by autopiloting and doing heavy time allocation weekly plans. Look at what you're facing. If it doesn't fit, you have those two weapons and you have to deploy them. To whatever extent is required to make this schedule reasonable, keep in mind that might entail radical changes. The college student equivalent of, I can't be a double major,

and I'm going to use these credits so I can reduce my course load, and I've got to quit three clubs. It might be whatever equivalent that is for your job, but your schedule is your schedule. And getting to the theme of this episode, if you just say, I'll just get after it, I'll work late, I'll work on the weekends, we'll somehow make this work, you're going to burn out. Sustainability is the key. And this is how you begin to fight more for sustainability at the scale of the schedule. This doesn't fit in a reasonable way. I have to make changes.

All right, I want to do a case study. So when you send in your questions for the show, you can also opt to send in. case studies of advice working well. All right, well, this case study comes from Ayaz, a 28-year-old engineer. Ayaz writes, my wife is a surgical resident, and as part of her training, she had to complete a five-week rotation in Anchorage, Alaska. My company was open to me working remotely on a temporary basis, so I went with her. While there, instead of working from home, I decided to rent a co-working space 1.5

miles away. This was around May to June, and I remember you're talking about the concept of working from near home, and this is exactly what I was doing. Separating work from home made intuitive sense to me. Boundaries are important. They allow you to give shape to life. The co-work was a quiet 15-minute walk away. This allowed me to get in the mindset of working. You know some parentheses. I would often listen to deep questions on these walks. That's a smart thing to do. The slow walk in your podcast would help prime my mind to focus intensely while working. between meetings to transition from one product to another or relax my nerves, I would also walk in the downtown Anchorage and grab a cup of coffee. It was a perfect way to get some thinking done or mentally shift focus from one project to another.

I also realized a profound impact mountains have on my experience of depth. The short stay in that city and working from near home has convinced me my vision of the deep life includes living close to mountains and preferably walking to work. So I like this case study for a particular reason I want to emphasize, but first I want to, fact check something here Jesse I'm reading IAS as saying he's 1.5 miles from his office and then he gets there in 15 minutes

walking he's walking pretty fast. That's a fast walk yeah I think that might be an impossibly fast walk a moderate-paced walk is about 20 minutes to a mile 1.5 miles I think he maybe he meant 0.5 miles or and I think this is equally

likely he's 11 feet tall. Because if you've figured out the stride length, I actually think that would work out just about right. I mean, I think the engineers among us can figure that out. But I think that would, having a double-length stride would probably get you down to roughly a moderate walking pace of a 10-minute mile. So 1.5 miles, 15 minutes. So IAS is 11 feet tall.

The thing I wanted to point out from this is the theme of this episode, which is trying to combat burnout by having, you know, finding this balance between intensity and non-intensity. It's not just about time. You know, I have busy periods and non-busy periods. I have this many hours of work versus that many hours of work. I'm looking at my schedule like with T.J. And I'm figuring out does it fit or not? And if it doesn't fit, I need to take things out or make things smaller.

Location also plays a role in the intensity of your work. Finding the separation that IAS found. Here's my home, here's my office. And I have a ritual about how I transition from one to another. And during the day, I can leave the office and see the mountains and walk in the downtown Anchorage and get a cup of coffee. The location can shift, location to recharge, location to transition from home to work. That will have a huge impact on the feeling of intensity of your actual effort.

So location can matter just as much as time. This is something I don't think we thought enough about during the knowledge workers who had to go remote during the pandemic, especially those who lived in places where that remoteness lasted for a really long time. We didn't think enough about location. We said, technically speaking, my laptop in my bedroom gives me all I need. And what we should have been saying is, but what is my sole need to actually get this work done in a sustainable way? I need to get out of this house. I need to be in whatever, a deep work shed in the backyard or this is a time, you know, because I'm lucky enough to have a stable knowledge work job that's not going away during the pandemic. We're not spending money on

anything else. We're not going on vacation. Great. I'm going to lease an office space for this year, so I have some place to go. Like, we should have cared more about that. And I want to hear what IAS does once they get back to where they are before. Are they going to move some more with mountains? Are they going to have a walk to work? It's exciting to me. That's lifestyle such a career planning is unfolding here, Jesse.

He had experiences that built a richer understanding of what he wanted his lifestyle to be like. And now he has this crystal clear image, which he can use the guide. So he needs location matters, where they live. Like that really is going to narrow down their search and open up some really interesting opportunities. So we got two things out of this, an emphasis on the important of location in injecting some slowness into your life and a cool case study and how really good lifestyle center career planning plans emerge. Let me do one more quick question here before we move on to something interesting. This one comes from Anonymous. Oh, you should read this, Jesse.

I'm sorry. I'm stepping on your toes here. No problem. This comes from Anonymous. Can you elaborate more on the celebration bucket? Is it definite, its definition seem more elusive to me. Right. So we talk about the deep life.

We talk about you have to focus on all aspects on your life when trying to find depth, focusing on what's important and minimizing or limiting things that aren't. And we often use the term buckets to talk about the different aspects of your life that are important. I like to alliteratively refer to C words to begin with C when naming my buckets. And we had craft and we had community and we have contemplation and we have constitution. And the last one I often talk about is celebration. Anonymous is saying, what does that mean? So roughly speaking, anonymous, when I think about celebration, I think about cool things in the world, appreciating cool things in the world unrelated to your work.

I think you can break that down into two specific subcategories, hobbies and gratitude. So this is, celebration includes things you do just for the pure non-functional value of doing them. I'm really into film. I hike. I'm into whatever. Alpine ice climbing. Whatever is these interest you develop that you can appreciate and find great value in that have nothing to do with your job. It's non-instrumental.

Also captures gratitude. The celebration is about do I have on a regular basis gratitude for things that I'm looking forward to or enjoy about my life right now? Do I have that in my life on a regular basis? I think it's important, for example, to regularly engineer experiences of gratitude into your life. I'm actually putting aside time. I'm going to go for a walk. I'm going to get home from work a little early. I'm going to go for a walk with the sunset.

And I'm going to think about some things I really am grateful for right now and this nice relaxing weekend that's coming up. And I'm really looking forward to it and just generate that sense of gratitude. I do that a lot. I started doing that in grad school because I, So I even refer to these experiences now in my internally as Cambridge moments. I used to engineer gratitude a lot when I was in grad school at MIT, but then I picked that up, especially in the winter I like to do this a lot. As the days get a little bit longer, I like, look, we still have sun in the sky.

It's only going to get brighter as the season goes on. And the snow is kind of scenic and engineered gratitude. That's part of the celebration bucket as well. So your hobbies and gratitude, that all falls on their celebration. Those are two aspects of your life that require emphasis, start with a habit, and then when you get around to it, overhaul that whole part of your life. I'm answering that question in this episode because the celebration bucket is a great bulwark against the craft bucket pushing you towards too much busyness, towards too much intensity. It is a bulwark against overwork and burnout because it is things that are non-instrumental enjoyment. there's something fundamentally slow about a hobby,

well-enjoyed, something slow about an engineer gratitude experience. So I think if we're going to think about how to inject more slowness into an otherwise overloaded life, keep the celebration bucket very much in mind. We're going to conclude things with something interesting, where I talk about interesting things that people sent to the interesting at calnewport.com email address. First, let me mention another sponsor that makes this show possible.

that's our longtime friends at Blinkist. You've heard me talk about Blinkist a lot because I think reading is the best way to gain high-quality ideas and high-quality ideas or the currency to success in our current culture. If you're into reading, you need to be a Blinkist subscriber. When you subscribe to Blinkist, you get access to 15-minute summaries called Blinks of a Blinkist. over 5,000 nonfiction books, you also can get 15-minute summaries of podcast, so they call those shortcast. This allows you to very quickly figure out what the big ideas are from a book and make that decision.

Do I know what I need to know? Or am I intrigued enough I want to buy this book? So it is like having a sidekick for the reading life. Jesse, you were telling me before we went on the air that you have a pretty particular blinkus process, right? a long time, Blinkist user. What's your, what's your blinkist process? How do you use Blinkist? Yeah, it's pretty cool. So for instance, Ryan Holiday sent out his books email last week, I think. So I went through those books and then went into Blinkist, put them on some of those on my save list.

And then about twice a week, I go into the app and, you know, read some of my save ones and then take them off saved and then it keeps it honed. Are you more a fan of the written blinks or the audio blinks? The written ones. The written ones. So if I didn't clarify before, you have two options with the blinks. If you're on the go, you can listen to them. Or in the app, you can just read them real quick. So I like Jesse's habit.

Every time you hear a book, you're thinking about, throw it in the blinkest in the app, and then just churn through those. What a great way to keep up with all the books, all the big ideas, and figuring out triage you what you want to buy and what you don't. So if you're going to be a reader and you should be, if you're a fan of the Deep Life, you should have a Blinkist account. They have a nice special feature. I want to mention real quick right now called Blinkist Connect that allows you to share your premium accounts.

You can get two premium subscriptions for the price of once. You can give a Blinkist account to a friend that you think needs it when you sign up for one. All right. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial and you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium. membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T. Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial. That's blinkist.com slash deep. And don't forget this limited time. For a limited time, you can use this

Blinkist Connect program to share your premium account. You'll get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. I also want to talk about another one of our sponsors. Latter. January, for me, like for other people, is a time where you realize your starting to put things off until the last minute. For me, it's, for example, when my accountant asked for tax information and I begin furiously procrastinating because I'm sure there's something in there. I don't know how to do it. Some documentation I'm missing. I'm sure everyone else has their own New Year example of putting things off. Most of the time, it's okay. You know, eventually get the tax information to them. But the one thing you really can't afford

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So that's ladderlife.com slash deep. Go there today to see if you're instantly improved. That's L-A-D-D-R-Life.com slash deep. Ladderlife.com slash deep. All right. Our final segment, something interesting. People send me cool things from around the web relevant to living a deep life to my address at interesting at Calhounuport.com.

I like to share things when I can. All right, today's example I want to share is an article from, this is from CBS News, so I saw this in a few, people sent this to me from a few places. If you were watching at YouTube.com slash Kaliport Media episode 231, you'll see this on your screen, an article where the title is, this Tokyo Cafe serves an antidote to writers block. So here is the idea behind this cafe in Tokyo is that, You don't just go in there and work, which you do. You pay $250 an hour. There's Wi-Fi and air-cooled computer stand. But you fill out a registration slip where you tell the proprietors of the cafe

what you're trying to do and how often you want them to come check on you and make sure you're actually doing it. If you don't just get a place to work, you get pressure to actually get that work done. So, like, there's an example here. I'm reading, here's someone who has to write a lecture due tomorrow. So on his registration slip, he asked to be checked in on, as they put in parentheses, gently harassed every half hour until he's done. A couple other examples in here.

A lot of rioters come in here. So they'll say, I want to make sure I get this many words written. Here's a writer who says they want to get 24 pages done and they want to be checked on every half hour about that, etc. Anyways, that's interesting. You want to get things done? Spend your money to try to get someone to harass you into. actually doing that work. Now the question is, what is my advice if you don't want to go to that cafe in Tokyo?

I would say it has to do with rituals and systems. This is when and where I do my deep work, and this is the rituals I do before and after that work is actually getting done. That's probably the more consistent way to actually get really hard cognitive work done. But what my advice shares with the strategy of this Tokyo Cafe is a recognition that deep work is difficult and our brain will try to get out of it if you approach it casually. you got to have something else. You got to have structure.

It could be paying someone to bother you, or it could be a nice schedule in a writing shed, but don't just think I'll get to it when I get to it. All right, one last thing I want to mention before we sign off for today, readers of my last book, A World Without Email, know how much research I pulled from the UC Irvine Informatics Professor Gloria Mark. Gloria Mark is one of the, I would say the, not one of, the leading researcher on the impact of the strategy.

actions in the workplace. So as you can imagine, I'm quite familiar with her work. Anyway, she has a new book out. So I'm giving this an unsolicited plug here on my show. I'm loading it up on the screen as well. The book is called Attention Span, a ground-baking way to restore balance, happiness, and productivity. So I just want to give this my, my thumbs up. She really is the leading researcher on doing these office ethnographies where they go in and study people in office environments. How often are they check an email? How often do they go back to their inbox?

They did research with thermal cameras and heart rate monitors. What happens to their stress levels when they see a message coming in? So she's the expert. So I'm glad she finally has this book. The only thing, Jesse, if you're going to buy this book, you are going to have to look past this rub they got the blurb in on the cover here. I don't know if you can see that. So there's a Cal Newport blurb on the cover of this book.

So that's how you know. I recommend it. So attention spanned by Gloria Mark, despite the fact that, you know, my name's on it. You should really give that book a try. All right, Jesse, I think it's all the time we have for today. Thank you, everyone, for listening or watching. If you want to submit your own questions or case study, see that link that's right in the show note description of this episode. We'll be back next week.

And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love. my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world,

you got to sign up for my newsletter at caldnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.